Tuition Fees

Labour have just announced their plan to reduce annual student tuition fees from £9000 to £6000. It has been four years since they provisionally announced it and press have been suggesting that it's been the subject of bitter debates behind the scenes. But now it's official, a cast-iron promise and a red line in any coalition negotiations. 

Labour are probably doing it in a direct appeal to younger voters who might be tempted over to the Greens. Labour introduced tuition fees in the first place and then raised them to £3k, despite saying they wouldn't, so they don't exactly have clean hands on this. And it's a high-risk strategy because what if their ability to form a coalition founders on this issue and this issue alone? It would make them look principled but arbitrary. On the other hand, if they drop the policy they may be condemned to the same fate as the Liberal Democrats who have not recovered from dropping their front-page opposition to higher student fees. And will it even work? Students are quite difficult to persuade to turn out at elections: compared to the Tories latest bribe to pensioners, it might be ineffective politics.

But I think it's a good idea and let me say why. Universities have, since 2010 (and on-and-off before that) been re-described not as centres of learning but as career-focused knowledge-providers, institutions designed to make their students super-employable at higher salaries than mere school leavers. This has been the justification for higher fees. The older notion of the universities as places centred on knowledge and understanding for their own sake has almost entirely disappeared. And yet, I would suggest, that this is the principle that virtually all academics in the university system believe in. Universities are a place where ideas should be imagined, developed, tested, disputed and debated, without immediate concern for practical application or even good taste. (This is why I'm totally opposed to there being blacklists on speakers, whether they be transphobic feminists or radical hate preachers, however much I dislike their positions.) Universities are privileged spaces in the best sense and they are there not just to contribute to GDP and growth (though assuredly they do that) but also to the betterment of ourselves and our culture.

The Coalition don't seem to like this. They are ideologically driven by market thinking and so nothing can have value in its own right; its value can only be revealed through market transactions. The ideologues of marketising the universities would undoubtedly see my comments above as an instance of 'producer capture': universities being run for the benefit of their staff, not their students - sorry, 'knowledge customers'. Hiking the tuition fee was the privatisation of university teaching; it passed the cost from the Treasury to the individual students. As such, the idea was to turn students into savvy consumers who would be more demanding of the education they receive.

I have some evidence - direct and anecdotal - that this has had some effect. Students have probably been a bit more demanding - and, to my mind, that's a good thing; students should be demanding and deserve get the best possible experience. The issue, though, is that the higher fees have not simply made students more demanding of the university experience; the fees have encouraged some students to demand a totally different kind of university experience. I hear from colleagues (fortunately, not at my institution) whose students have complained about their essays getting low marks on the basis that they are paying £9k per year, as if students are paying for a degree, rather than paying for tuition and the chance to achieve one. I have heard of students who skip classes justifying their absenteeism on the basis that they are paying so they can do what they like. I have heard of students who have claimed the right to determine the content of their course, to study just those things they are familiar with already and 'enjoy' (which is, at best, a marginal consideration when it comes to deciding the content of a course). I am sure that no one, seriously, believes that these are reasonable demands - probably not even those students themselves. Yet they are the symptoms of a piece of social engineering dressed up as economic responsibility and market rationalisation.

Sure, there is room for improvement in the university sector. (Where isn't there?) Standards of teaching are probably a bit too variable. One hears about courses where the content hasn't changed in years, where the staff are repeating the same old lectures year after year, where students are treated as an inconvenience rather than a central focus of the university's existence. But to believe, as some right-wing commentators claim to, that this is in any sense the norm or even a significant aspect of university life is to be out of touch with the waves of serious thinking about pedagogy, curriculum, development, differentiation, assessment and feedback that is the norm in universities now, just as much as it is in schools.

Talk of 'producer capture' might have had some pertinence years ago, but now university staff are assessed, mentored, appraised, and questionnaired to within an inch of their professional lives. We have departmental teaching committees, faculty teaching committees, university teaching committees, all of whom take the education of our students very seriously and work very hard to make sure it is as appropriate, thoughtful, engaging, challenging and serious as possible. We have QAA assessments; we have the National Student Survey. We take these things seriously. I know no one in my university who takes their teaching responsibilities lightly. All my colleagues take pride in renewing their courses, challenging themselves and their students, finding new and engaging ways to introduce students to new ideas, practices and debates. The wider culture has not caught up with this: from Fresh Meat to The Hard Problem, students are feckless drunken shaggers and the staff are, well, the same. And, hey, I think Fresh Meat is very funny, but its vision of academics hasn't moved on since The History Man.

Here's the thing: students are not customers. How do we know that students aren't customers? Because you are a customer in Tesco. And when you're in Tesco, when you get to the end of your shopping trip, no one comes along and marks you on the quality of your shop. As an academic, I should be and am more expert than the undergraduates I teach and it is right that I judge how well they are doing. The customer is always right, but students are not. If they were, everyone would graduate with a 1st. The joyful value of a university education is for students to work with academics at the leading edge of their disciplines, actively engaged in thinking through some of the toughest debates, the most intractable problems, the most fascinating corners of the subjects that we all - staff and students alIke - find endlessly curious and are devoting our lives to.

Let me also say that the value of academic education is something that is not revealed immediately. I still draw on things I learned at university (or even at school), insights into how to handle ideas, ways of connecting and resolving problems, asides that some lecturer might have made about a particular topic. I was not, in other words, in a position before or even straight after my degree to judge its value and assign a market price. Universities are one of the good places in our culture; they are one of the great inventions of the last millennium and they work amazingly well through the hard work, devotion, imagination, skill and pride of the people who work in them. 

So I think it is good that a future Labour government will reduce the student fees to £6000.

• It sends a signal that the universities and the education of our bright young people is something of value to the whole of society, not simply to those young people themselves. 
• Since just under 50% of students look unlikely to pay back their tuition fee loans, the existing system is actually more expensive than the system it replaced. The government is using taxpayers money to fund an costly ideological experiment in turning students inappropriately into consumers.
• Some have pointed out that applications to university have gone up since the higher fees were introduced. This is a dubious argument: (a) application rates have been rising steeply since the late nineties; they were hit heavily in 2012 but despite that bump they have returned to the underlying trend. (b) Does anyone seriously believe that the higher fees have made universities more attractive to students? What evidence is there to believe that lower fees with deter students? And without this argument - and the actual higher cost of the current system - the case for £9k collapses.
• Britain has the second-highest average university tuition fees in the world with only the US higher. And the drift elsewhere in Europe is the other way; a year ago, Germany's university system completed a national abolition of tuition fees. Other countries where there are no European tuition fees include Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway and Sweden. In France, The Netherlands, Spain and fees are somewhere between £150 and £1500. It is possible for a state to pay for its university system; there is nothing inevitable about passing the responsibility of fees from the society as a whole to the individual students.

But I do have two questions for Ed Miliband:

• He has said that the shortfall in university will be made up from the Treasury. He seems very vague about this. There is talk of capping tax-breaks on pension contributions and pension pots. This ring-fencing might seem like a good way of reassuring the public that the policy is fully costed, but what if the policy doesn't produce the income anticipated? (Most Treasury predictions seem to be wildly inaccurate.) If the government reduces the fee income but doesn't replace the missing £3000, universities will get the worst of both worlds. There needs to be a firm commitment to replace that funding.
• Will this be backdated? Say Labour get elected in May 2015. They announce that the lower fees will come in in September 2016. If I were a student, holding an offer for entry in 2015, why would I go? Why not take a gap year, get a job, cool my heels until the lower fees? In other words, universities will take a massive hit in 2015 - much harder that the dip in 2012 (and, god knows, that was terrifying enough). There needs to be an commitment to dropping the fees immediately. And if you're going to do that, which you can, there should, for the sake of justice, be a retrospective reduction of student debt from 2012 to £6k. It would be a terrible thing if the poor students, whose misfortune was to be born between 1994 and 1996, ended up carrying this anomalously high debt. The Government abandoned plans last year to sell the student loan book so you can do this. 

It's a good policy. It is the beginning of a rebalancing of our culture's attitude to Higher Education. It's time to end this failed experiment in marketising university education.

Islands

Islands is a new play, written by Caroline Horton out of a devising process, which takes as its subject the behaviour of the super rich and the existence of tax havens. At the beginning of the play, a group of disgusting people set themselves up as gods and occupy a floating island ('haven') above the ordinary world ('shitworld'). Their values get lauded as the values of the whole society, in the media, in charity, in religion, in entertainment. One member of the group, Eve, is kicked out of this paradise and starts a rebellion against the gods, who are then made briefly uncomfortable by the media. Eve returns and wreaks a violent revenge on Mary, the chief of the gods, and announces to us all that only violent revolution will end the rule of the super-rich. But this turns out to be a false ending and, as Mary resurrects, the cast come together to sing a song about the resilience of the rich.

This plot synopsis doesn't really give you a sense of the show, though. The whole show is a disgusting, exuberant, foul, eloquent, lavatorial, piece of popular theatre mashed up with performance art. It is brilliantly designed, in a kind of disused empty swimming pool of a set, cracked, stained, dirty and missing tiles, with amateurish random bits of scaffolding and lights, a kind of rubbish-tip aesthetic running through the whole thing. The costumes are a grotesque mixture of drag, buffon, and carnival, distended breasts and pendulous balls, filthy underwear, junk shop hats and glasses and mismatched shoes, nightmarish make-up. The cast are remarkable: Caroline Horton is a kind of ringmaster, Lording it over the rest; John Biddle and Seiriol Davies are brilliant as her two semi-dragged up lustful, leering acolytes, bursting with terrifying energy throughout; Simon Startin and Hannah Ringham are Adam and Eve, plucked up from poverty and urged to aspire to the lifestyles of the super-rich; there are moments of real pathos as they both barely manage to keep up with values they don't understand, but still nervily mimic the words and movements of their masters. The sound design (by Elena Peña) is a layered collage of soundbites, TV, jingles, percussive interruptions and capitalism pastiche. 

It's not nice. The show is obsessed with shit, arses, farts and dirt. There is a constant stream of verbal diarrhoea in the strictest sense. It's nasty and it dwells on its nastiness. Daringly, for a show that is all about going too far, we are dared to dislike it, dared to walk out. It's a show that knows it's not nice (I thought of John Lydon's lament in the dying days of the Sex Pistols in January 1978: 'ever had the feeling you've been cheated?'. Similarly disgusted, similarly hating.) On other nights, there have been walk outs. I think I saw half a row not come back from the interval (more on that later), but this audience stayed where they were. It's crude and it's horrible and it's filthily funny, but this is not a mistake; this show knows exactly what it is doing. It is a show that wants to go too far and doesn't want to enlighten us. It wants to ram our faces in the ashtray of our own world.

It's a show that wants to express the fundamental attitudes of the super-rich. It's not trying to analyse the economics of financial offshoring or the political complicity in global inequality. It wants to stop pretending that rich people are basically people like us just with more money. It's a show that wants us to understand that the super-rich hate us, really really hate us. It's a show of furious moral disgust. It's a show that is as disgusting as capitalism.

That makes the show sound like undifferentiated bile. But actually there are several powerful and resonant images. From the beginning, rather than money, we see these gods amassing cherries. Mary carried around a champagne bucket full of them offering them to and withholding them from the audience. They function as money, as forbidden fruit, as luxury, and as humanity too. The gods continually receive shipments of cherries; as Adam, mainly, carries them in, these packages leak bright sanguine red trails of cherry juice. It is an image that makes money look murderous. The squalor of Haven is a resonant and productive image that is used to great effect by the cast. There is a substantial and punchy speech 45 minutes in about bullfighting, which mixes fact with violent imagination and becomes an image of the rich's teasing slow killing of the state. There's a brilliant sequence when Mary expels Eve from Haven; she speaks a thunderous curse in a made-up language ('crack crack ber no frenzy taredsawre EVE EVA EVAAAA'), which is followed by Agent quoting the Bible ('I will greatly multiply thy sorrow') and then turning invisibly into Anne Sexton ('Bring me her heart, I will salt it and eat it').

It reminded me of The People Show and Duckie. I thought of that early performance art from the 1960s and early seventies: The Pip Simmonds Group, even Christie in Love. It made me think of all those violently revolutionary plays from last year (Wolf From the Door, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, Birdland, Pomona - christ it even had a set that looked like Pomona). I also thought about Bakhtin. The Russian cultural historian and theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, argued that the 'carnivalesque' was a subversive strain in world culture, which was entirely different from the rational, ironic and analytical style of high culture; this popular tradition is dialogic and subversive and popular, dwelling on the lower-body stratum (cocks and bums and cunts) rather than the rarified upper body stratum of heart and head. It's messy and crude and, in its dialogism and heteroglossia, it represents a cacophony of popular voices rather than any kind of officialese. I know what Bakhtin would have thought of Islands and I like what he would have thought of it.

Look, it's not perfect. There are quite a few things in it that seemed to me a bit half-hearted and didn't really come off. There are some uncertainties of tone and, for some stretches, I was a bit bored. It's still a bit long I reckon.

But while it's messy, it's not a mess. The false ending, where Hannah Ringham scarily intones over Mary's apparently dead body...

This is how it must be. To end this long night of our captivity, this degradation, and take back the riches of justice and freedom. It is our work. It is yours and yours and yours and yours. People will do this. And I swear it has already begun.

... is a hugely exciting moment in the theatre. More blank revolution. But then the acolytes start agreeing. And you realise it's become bleakly empty ('Humanity's pulled it out of the bag' / 'I've never felt so optimistic. Thank you, Eve'). It's perfectly judged, because just when you think you might be getting some conventional catharsis (they even name it as such), the release is snatched from you and you stay angry. It's theatrically and politically sophisticated.

What do critics want? It's a mystery sometimes. Islands at the Bush has had some pretty stinky reviews. Michael Billington called it 'toothless and self-delighting'; Holly Williams pronounced it 'crude, rude, but not especially funny'; for Matt Trueman it was 'less a play than a placard. Best avoided'; Aleks Sierz was blunt: 'it is pretty shit'. But most of them seem to want it to be something that - it seems to me - it is not remotely trying to be. It is clearly not trying to critically analyse tax havens, or offer an economics lessons; it is not trying to offer some constructive solutions and nor is trying to satirise or 'send up' the super-rich. But all these reviews hammer Islands for not providing these things. 

In fairness, I gather from some people that the show has been cut down since Press Night. And indeed there was a quite unexpected five-minute interval forty minutes in. This turned out to be a stroke of genius. I had been finding the show a bit annoying at that point. But in the break I was able to take stock, admit to the person next to me that I was't completely with it yet, and with that little release, I started to really enjoy the rest of the show. And if that's new, well it's a good idea.

But still, it's a bit bloody weird that the critics have been so uniformly hostile. Now, it's okay for someone not to like what it is trying to do and to wish that Caroline Horton and her cast had decided to do something different. But simply to ignore what it is trying to do and treat it as a failed version of a completely different evening of theatre is unimaginative and perverse.

Islands is much better than those reviews. It's fun and messy and huge. Worth a punt.

Theatre Review of the Year 2014

This has been a fantastic year. After a few years where I've felt a bit despondent about the quality of new theatre work, this year feels like a complete rebirth. Interestingly and - depending on your view - encouragingly, it's an advance on all fronts at once. It's not just a good year for the playwrights or a time for the directors to shine, so many areas of theatre seem to be powering at the moment. It's a year that's seen the exciting renewal of a couple of theatre buildings, the Almeida and Orange Tree in particular; we've seen some great new plays, but some astonishing revivals too. There seems to be a sea-change in British directing and design practices. There have been moments of astonishing acting. Maybe I picked well; maybe I was just lucky. But I can't remember feeling this positive about London theatre since the 1990s.

At the risk of disappointing those who look upon me as an omniscient God of theatre - yes you do, don't deny it - this is a plainly partial and incomplete survey of the theatre year. I go to the theatre once or twice a week so I don't see everything. I don't get many freebies so some things I fail to see because I'm too slow (e.g. Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire). I rarely venture out of London to see theatre, unfortunately. I tend towards theatre, rather than live art. I rarely see a new musical. Mainly can't be arsed with the West End. Oh and it's not even the end of the year yet. Haven't seen Hope yet, for instance. If you want to see the headlines, my top 10 is at the bottom of the page.

But let's start with new work. I was intrigued by a pervasively apocalyptic turn this year in subject and style. The year started with a pair of plays at the Court exploring the nature of evil. John Donnelly's The Pass and Simon Stephens's Birdland were only superficially plays about football and rock music. In fact they were both about unimaginably rich young men with moral vacuums where their hearts should be. Stephens's play eventually punished its Baal-like anti-hero; Donnelly's play stripped him bare, brutally exposed him. In both plays, I felt I was present at a kind of enquiry into the values of our culture, in fact, obliquely, into the values of this government, comprising as it does very rich youngish men with moral vacuums where their hearts should be. Money has removed any gap between desire and satisfaction for Donnelly's Jason and Stephens's Paul and, as a result, satisfaction has ceased to satisfy and desires spread like wild fire from peach to underage girl, from a cuddle in a hotel room to an orgiastic destruction of the same. This gives each of these characters a kind of apocalyptic omnivorous quality (a little like the boys in Posh). The tone of both plays seemed nihilistic though they also seemed distanced from that nihilism in their desperate search for some guttering flame of goodness in the darkness of their hearts. (May I also say that Andrew Scott's performance in Birdland was possibly the performance of the year - in a crowded year [Whelan, Strong, Walker, more] - and when we came out of the theatre I had the same feeling as first seeing Mark Rylance in Jerusalem. Yeah, that good.)

If images of extreme nihilistic destruction were a way of characterising the values of our culture, similar images were used to imagine its overturning. The title of Alice Birch's remarkable Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again beautifully exemplifies everything that is explosively original, intensely excessive, and formally inventive about this play which calls for unending revolution of art, language, the body, marriage, and theatre and does so in a series of compelling, funny, unsettling scenes that seemed both to be episodes from the end of a culture and also, troublingly, recognisable glimpses of our world. Chris Goode's Men in the Cities was blisteringly powerful, sad and exhilarating. Its concern was masculinity, but wait come back, it's so better than that sounds. It interweaves a series of stories of men, broken and brutal, both insufficiently and excessively articulate, through the complicated melancholy of a city. Throughout though, movingly, the problem of Goode's own authorship becomes a tormented concern; he is horrified by his own responsibility, his power (which begins in the classic omniscience of telling us a dream that the dreamer himself has forgotten and ends in the triumphant omniscience of the author killing a truly despicable character). But in the middle he agonises through narrating a suicide, engages gingerly with his father, and he also gives us a great cut down the middle of theatre which is a jaw-droopingly beautiful speech by Brian to a Gay Twink Angel which was screamed almost inaudibly over music and made me feel like I was touching heaven. The useless magnificence and the necessarily unnecessary brutality of the ending seemed to articulate together this left-apocalypticism that I felt I saw everywhere this year. Rory Mullarkey's The Wolf from the Door upstairs at the Court showed us the country consumed by violent destruction and enjoyed the spectacle, particularly as it was the little platoons of middle England pulling the trigger. It was a stunning production from the ever-fascinating James Macdonald and it solved the problems of the play's violence (how do you show someone being beheaded? should you show someone being beheaded?) and comically abstracted these moments, giving us the gesture of appalling dystopian violence but at a scrutinising distance. 

In my article on Pomona at the Orange Tree, I noted this apocalyptic strain too. Character after character wishing it all to go away, all of us not to wake up, imagining a return to the hated city in flame and burning it all to ash, covering the city in shit and cum. But in this, perhaps more so than in any other play, this apocalypse was happening to a world both completely original in its imagination and rigorously recognisable as our own. Pomona was a huge and violent and achingly beautiful and absurdly funny statement about who we are and where we're going. In my article I didn't single anyone out, but having seen it again, I do want to send huge waves of joyful appreciation to Sam Swann as Charly, Rebecca Humphries as Fay, and Sean Rigby as Moe. Everyone was good; everyone was great. But these three were out of this world.

Christopher Brett Bailey's This Is How We Die (pictured above) was a blistering monologue which tore apart just about everything, a motormouthed scorched-earth assault on the culture, queerer than queer, hipper than hip, the cadences taking me to 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' via Burroughs and Kerouac and Dennis Cooper. It's coming back to the Battersea Arts Centre next year so, if you didn't see it, go see it and don't read the rest of this paragraph, because at the end they do this thing where they play this incredibly loud Velvet Underground kind of rock grind and the lights blind you and you feel entirely consumed and it's really just as fucking unbelievably good as everyone said. Honestly, it's incredible. It's transcendent. Go.

Tim Crouch's Adler and Gibb was a very different kind of play: a play that wrestled with the very idea of representation (there were fraternal bonds between it and Men in the Cities). It divided audiences like all the best stuff this year (Mr Burns, Pomona, this) but it joined in the apocalypse party by asking whether there is something brutal in the very act of representation. The story was a brilliant pastiche, a meticulously constructed fake history of two avant-garde 1970s New York conceptual artists, and the play and performance carried off a series of powerful theatrical inversions. The stage and the actors began the play stripped almost bare but as the scenery and the costumes and the props were brought on, it felt, designedly, like a kind of violation, a stripping away rather than a clothing, an impoverishment rather than an enrichment. As the play got more conventional, in narrative terms, the less satisfactory it seemed. For some critics this was a flaw. For me, that was the whole point and it was a beautiful, austerely serious, profoundly smart and challenging evening. I was also mesmerised, horrified and thrilled by Philip Ridley's Dark Vanilla Jungle, another writerly reinvention, a ferocious and cruel monologue (think a one-hour Not I), performed with jaw-dropping commitment by Gemma Whelan, in which, once again, a world is built up and destroyed before our eyes and ears. It was heartbreaking stuff.

And then there was Mr Burns at the Almeida, which again imagined the apocalypse, and the renaissance of culture from the ashes of our own, constructed out of its half-remembered fragments and passing from pastime to commerce to a religion of high culture. It both gloried in our end and affirmed the permanent value of storytelling. Visionary and hilarious theatremaking and one of the high points of a year of high points for the Almeida.

Yep, the Almeida, which for a couple of decades has occupied a position as offering wealthy, safe, stylish versions of European classics to its wealthy, safe, stylish clientele. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's probably just as wealthy and stylish but it seems much less safe. The first play I ever saw at the Almeida, in 1988, was Howard Barker's The Possibilities; this year, I really saw the Almeida's possibilities. Under Rupert Goold, it seems to have embarked on a pell-mell cannonball run through versions of what a contemporary theatre might be. I say more about its revivals below, but in terms of new work its Schumpeter-style creative destruction also gave us Little Revolution which neatly side-stepped directly showing us the riots but instead looted the theatre, remodelling its shapes, flooding it with, gulp, young people, filling the stage with noises. It also gave us King Charles III, by Mike Bartlett, a play about the imagined near-future of our monarchy in mock-Shakespearean style complete with iambic pentameter, ghosts, comic subplots and more. I saw this advertised and immediately thought, that sounds like the worst idea ever. Was I ever wrong. It was triumphant. The adoption of the Jacobean mode stayed just the right side of thin pastiche and it was just a delight; everything just worked: the production, the language, the performances.

Shakespeare's example was around quite a bit this year. It haunted Rona Munro's The James Plays, a retelling of the first three Scottish kings which began directly in Shakespeare, emerging from an episode from Henry V before telling its own stories in its own style, though retaining the grandeur, the mixture of private and public, a certain elevation of language. The trilogy, each part in a rather different form, engaged directly and elliptically with the Scottish referendum, performances in Edinburgh before the vote electrified by the debate, performances in London after it welcomed, it seemed to me, with tearful relief. A third piece which found a Shakespearean model to tell, its story was David Eldridge's Holy Warriors at the Globe; the first half in Elizabethan History Play mode, the second half spiralling off into something immensely powerful and strange, a kaleidoscopic collage of the West's dealings with the Middle East. Once again, it confirmed David Eldridge as our theatre's great shape-shifter, a brilliant writer, continually exploring and renewing his own craft, his signature being only his intense, beautiful, sincere compassion for people.

Even here there was something apocalyptic in the playing out of our orientalist endgame, the form and the content teetering constantly on the edge of chaos. This theme of apocalyptic destruction ran through so much interesting work this year it felt like a symptom and a warning of a society furiously facing crisis and, given the government we have and the system we have, I think it's profoundly positive sign of a theatre taking us to the edge of what our culture considers thinkable. 

I can't remember a year with so many superb revivals. At the Almeida (again), Rupert Goold's new(ish) take on The Merchant of Venice is ferociously smart, transplanting it to Vegas, it solves some of the play's problems by finding a location where money is both overwhelmingly important and gaudily emptied of meaning. The test to win Portia's hand is translated intact as a tacky game show, which is just what it is, but the court room, brilliantly staged though it was, is allowed to be upstaged by foregrounding the subtextual gay relationship in the play. It is unsettling good fun. The Donmar's Henry IV was another strong reworking, with Harriet Walter a lean and brooding King and Ashley McGuire an adorable, contemptible, pitiful Falstaff. Apparently this is the second of a trilogy of all-women productions: I hope hope hope we're going to see Harriet Walter's King Lear. David Tennant was a really wonderful Richard II, his mixture of steel and playfulness for me more impressive than his Hamlet. At the Globe, I loved Lucy Bailey's Titus Andronicus (I missed it in 2006) and found the new indoor playhouse a wonderful machine for rediscovering a play as familiar as The Duchess of Malfi.

Mostly it was modern revivals that floored me. Lisa Dwan's Beckett Trilogy showed that, even within the tight parameters of Beckett's vision and his Estate's affordances, there is considerable room to rediscover, explore, invent. Not I and Rockaby were a kind of perfection and this is from someone who saw Billie Whitelaw (RIP) doing Rockaby at the Riverside in 1986. God I feel old. Bijan Sheibani's take on A Taste of Honey, with two blisteringly funny, lovable performances from Lesley Sharp and Kate O'Flynn at its heart, brought that old play as bright as a new pin, helped also by a spinning, rambling set from Hildegard Bechtler.

These were, dare I say, relatively conventional revivals, great though they were (and let's not get sniffy about great, straight revivals). But something else was going on. The influence of Three Kingdoms, and the Lyric's invitation in 2012 to young directors to rethink how they show the world, was felt all over. Carrie Cracknell's production of Birdland, with its elegantly abstract Ian McNeil set, gradually sunk the cast in dark water while bubbles of abandoned possibility descended from the skies. Abigail Graham's revival of Dennis Kelly's Debris, over at the relocated Southwark Playhouse, unfolded amid brickdust and girders and was hypnotically good. Hamish Pirie's production of Teh Internet is Serious Business (together with Chloe Lamford's impossible set) was a dazzling attempt to get virtual cyberspace into the foursquare material space of the Royal Court stage. There was in fact a fair bit of Adler & Gibbery around: Ellen McDougall's Idomoneus at The Gate found an exhilaratingly abstract language for this classical deconstruction; is there a better director than McDougall around at the moment? I seem to love everything she does. James Macdonald's abstracted The Wolf from the Door was Adler and Gibbish too. I felt this most strongly at Our Town at the Almeida (the Almeida? change the record, Dan) which took a play which I really didn't think I liked, pared it back and made it feel lean and thrilling. And when, in the last act, we suddenly get richly detailed Naturalist staging, just as in Adler & Gibb, it feels like betrayal and delusion. The ensemble was magnificent, the mostly British accents working just fine: there was a play and there was a production and we were fine with them being different. 

The idea that those things should, in some unspecified way, be the same is part of the naturalist inheritance of our theatre and I was struck by how many Naturalist classics were the crucible for thrilling reinvention. The Belvoir Company production of The Wild Duck (which took Ibsen's characters and story and wrote a contemporary play with them) was just great. I don't often cry in the theatre, but I did here because the ending was, as it should be, emotionally devastating. The epilogue, in which Hjalmar and Gina, a year on from the death of their daughter, find they can't reconcile, went straight to the heart of the play, stripped of its Victoriana and the anaesthesia of classic status. The play was in a glass box, virtually no props or furniture, but, in a kind of ironic nod to hyper naturalist staging, a real wild duck. But this was all to give us the debate, the emotion, the relationships, the loss. I'd love to see all Ibsen done like this, at least once. Ostermeier's An Enemy of the People was another contemporary transposition. Our Stockmann ends up ranting about the bankers and austerity economics - and then the baton is handed to us: the house lights are up and we're invited to speak. The night I went, it was extremely tacky. Some quavering earnest voices. A reference to the Scottish referendum. Someone stood up and denounced the real injustice being the woman who'd asked her to stop talking during the performance. It didn't work, but that's because we didn't work. It exposed, in a tiny way, the failings of our liberal democracy, through the daring failure of a moment of theatre. Katie Mitchell's The Cherry Orchard completed her cycle of productions of Chekhov's major plays but there was nothing climatic or monumental about it; this was, again, pared down, accelerated, the characters skittering on and off the stage as if they were on a ship being tossed on the sea. The scenes were all relocated to one room in the house, which was progressively denuded. The action was shifted from its original location, but, unusually for Mitchell, not to a precise alternative period; there was a modern suit, a seventies dress, a reference to the freeing of the serfs. It felt like a play in which the time was out of joint. It was an enervated production about living in precarious times. (As perhaps a side note, the reinvention of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin as a piece of music theatre, at the Finborough and then Park Theatre, was, to my slight surprise, a complete triumph.)

And then, confounding all our binaries, the most faithful, textual, pared down, new-writing-style production of a play this year came from Ivo van Hove, the paint-throwing, punk-ass adulte terrible of European theatre, who took another American play that I didn't think I liked, A View from the Bridge, and found in it what it was aways intended to be: a modern tragedy. A deep thrust stage, white lights, almost no furniture or props (again - poor stage furniture makers; it's been a bad year): and the result was beyond words. In 1989, I saw Garry Hynes's Druid production of A Whistle in the Dark, which had transferred to the Royal Court. It's a story about an Irish family who come to Britain where a younger brother has emigrated with his wife. The clashes of personality, family, culture and class lead with a sickening sense of inevitability to a tragic conclusion. Before this year, it was my only experience of what I think Aristotle means by catharsis, my go-to example of theatre that evokes and somehow healthily reorganises our deepest most disorganised anxieties. And then I saw A View from the Bridge and I experienced it again. Again, all pared down, nothing extraneous, a gorgeous cast (led by Mark Strong and Nicola Walker, both captivating), building to the ending, where, in the only remotely flamboyant directorial intervention, the cast and stage are doused in blood and a shutter slowly hides their tragedy from us. It's a production that I will think about for the rest of my life.

There's no singular movement to see here, just a renewal of confidence and boldness, a new wave of directors, a new wave of writers, a couple of theatres taking risks and showing how exciting that can be again. The Almeida's my theatre of the year. I'm looking forward to seeing if the Orange Tree can hold its nerve and become, against the run of play, the most exciting theatre in London. Obviously we're all looking to Rupert Goold to see if he can make the National join this energy wave. There were great signs of nose-thumbing innovation at the Court. Of course, if the Tories get in again, they'll probably cut arts subsidy to almost nothing. The year's apocalyptic turn might be a last gasp, but I hope it's a fightback.

Everyone's doing top 10s this year, so here's mine.

1. A View from the Bridge (Young Vic)
2. Pomona (Orange Tree)
3. This is How We Die (BAC)
4. Idomoneus (Gate)
5. The Wild Duck (Barbican)
6. Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (RSC)
7. Adler & Gibb (Royal Court)
8. The Wolf From the Door (Royal Court)
9. Mr Burns (Almeida)
10. Men in the Cities (tour)

Pomona

In the early summer of 1968, Paul McCartney read an interview with Pete Townsend in Guitar Player magazine from  the previous year, in which Pete talks about The Who's then-recent recording of 'I Can See For Miles', describing it as totally wild, abandoned, dirty, and raw. The legend is that Paul was very excited by the description and got hold of the single - and that he was very disappointed by what he heard. 'I Can See For Miles' is a terrific song but it isn't that wild, not that dirty and raw. And, still buzzing from the idea of a piece of music that he had imagined, he went into the studio and recorded 'Helter Skelter', which isn't the wildest, most abandoned, dirty and raw song ever, but it's on the way there, and has a claim to inventing heavy metal.

I thought of this watching Pomona, because I can't tell you how many times I've been told about an amazing new play that's wild and abandoned and breaks all the rules and is totally contemporary and thrilling and instead I've just ended up seeing more of the same. But at the Orange Tree, Pomona is it; this is the real deal. This is a play that could change how we write plays. It's a play that could change our theatre. I've seen a few theatre shows that have passed into theatre history: The Oresteia at the National in 1981, The Mahabharata at the Tramway in 1988, Blasted at the Theatre Upstairs in 1995, Jerusalem at the Royal Court in 2009. I'd add Pomona to that list. It's the most exciting new play I've seen in years. It's a play that could change how we see and understand our world. 

So, describe Pomona then. Well that's already tough. I'd say that a woman goes missing.in Manchester and her identical twin tries to enlist help to find her. I think the missing woman has problems with drugs and debts and becomes a prostitute and then falls in with a gang who get her to film violent porn movies. I think she then disappears one day and her friend in the brothel discovers that their boss has their blood-type information on her computer. I think their boss then enlists two security guards to kill the friend, perhaps acting on the authority of The Girl, a mythical unnamed figure who controls everything and I mean everything. I think the guards kidnap the friend but bungle it and are forced to fake a violent attack. I think that inadvertently one of the guards dies from the wounds administered in the fake attack. I think the sister looking for her twin eventually stumbles upon an underground hospital where the disappeared are being kept, their organs harvested, their bodies used as baby farms. I think the twin escapes but her sister does not. However, some or all of this might just be events taking place in a RPG, dungeon-mastered by Charlie. It could be a dream or a nightmare or a fiction or it might all be real. I'll be honest, I spent some of the performance confused, much of it uneasy, moments of it actually frightened, but at no point did I doubt that what I was watching was somehow necessary, urgent, inevitable, and about us now. Moe, one of the guards, announces 'It's all real. / All of it. / Everything bad is real' (p. 101).

Real is an interesting word to talk about in relation to this play. It's clearly not 'realism': it has a kind of urban gothic quality that pushes beyond realism into something darkly stylised. There are scenes that clearly aren't real: near the end, Charlie (the other Guard) meets Zeppo, a man who owns much of the city, but who is now a seagull. Earlier Charlie has persuaded Keaton to play an RPG entering on a cult that hope to revive the terrible sleeping God Chthulu, who is a figure from the works of H P Lovecraft, so obviously not real, though we have met Chthulu in the first scene, sitting with Zeppo and Ollie, obsessively throwing dice (or, in the text, solving Rubik's Cubes). So is Chthulu real? Or is the first scene a fantasy? Or does the whole play take place in a liminal zone - like the abandoned urban zone of Pomona - neither living nor dead, both real and imaginary?

And what's more the rather linear account of the plot that I offer above is no respecter of the play's riddling structure which jumps back and forth in time, requiring that we mentally reorder the play in our heads. But this isn't always possible to do: where does Charlie's RPG fit in the structure? It's very hard to say. The chronological disordering has troubling and unsettling effects on our ability to understand who is who, particularly the twin sisters. Although the text tells us who is which sister in each scene, on stage this is hard to work out. In the final scene, the captured twin has escaped from hospital, but things are so murky at this point that it could equally be the searching twin who has decided to swap her life with her twin. Zeppo's reality is very questionable - as I've already mentioned, he shares a life with Chthulu and turns into a seagull, and then there's the matter of his name. Zeppo and Keaton suggest Marx and Buster, a figures from another clownishly existential world. Who is Keaton? Is she the Girl referred to at various times? Scene fifteen seems to say so; scene eight says not. The play does not know and instead offers character as ghost, slippage, people appearing and disappearing all over the city; in one stunning sequence in this production, the twins appear and reappear in jump cuts across the stage. It's thrilling and terrifying.

But realism still. This isn't just fantasy. There's a patterning of motifs and events and concerns and attitudes that play out across the surface of the play that suggests our own culture, in our own time: drugs, faddish religions, faceless corporations, pervasive capitalism, school shootings, pornography, prostitution, gaming and body horror. In its skewed and nightmarish way this is a vision of us now. The great and exciting thing about a play like this is the way that it reorders your mind; it gathers together other manifestations in our wider culture and retrospectively makes sense of them. I thought of Dennis Kelly's Utopia in this, with its mixture of brutality, dystopia, cartoon imagery, mysticism. I thought of the mixture of gritty realism and sheer surrealism in Three Kingdoms. I think of the way Philip Ridley's plays have been mixing dreams, realism and comic-book violence for 25 years. 

I thought particularly of the strain of apocalyptic political interventions in the theatre this year: Alice Birch's Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again and Rory Mullarkey's Wolf from the Door both of which suggest a furious, nihilistic disgust at the world and apparently offers utter destruction and rebirth as an answer. Here the play is filled with images of horrified nihilism, the possibilities of moral redemption virtually non-existent. Moe denounces a world in which a man like him can walk around. Ollie, the missing twin, tells her friend Fay:

I think I hate everyone
It's like a sickness I can feel in my guts.
I wake up every morning and I feel it all over.
I can't get to sleep because it turns in me,
All this hate.
I think I'd sleep a lot easier if I knew none of us would wake up tomorrow.
Do you feel that?
. . .
One day I'll come back to this city on fire.
I'll have flames pouring from me.
And I'll keep walking through the streets in circles until everyone and everything is just ash.
I'll bring the end to everyone. (p. 62).

Is this a good thing? I can imagine perfectly reasonable critics objecting to this: isn't this a kind of rejection of politics as a process of change? Isn't this an embrace of a murderous anti-humanist darkness? Are these plays not capitulating to the very horrors that they are representing? I don't think so. First, because all of these plays retain a warmth and humanity in the wit and empathy of the writing (and, in production, in the performance). Second, because plays do not have to set out a detailed political manifesto: these plays are expressing a scream of rage at the totality of our corrupt politics. They express - violently, desperately, shockingly - an outside to our current contingent politics; they force us to imagine a sheer other to the world we live in; they express the genuine contempt that so many of us have for a world that seems to value money more than people. The images of destruction are a gesture of determination to hold open the imagination, at any cost; they mark an extreme limit, to hold that limit there, to insist that things can be different. In their very different way they are like that cry from Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play, 'don't let the future be like this' (p. 108). But these writers, and this play, are saying, 'don't let now be like this'.

I hear in Moe's 'everything bad is real' a - surely unintended - echo of Hegel's 'everything that is rational is real'. Hegel is writing with the nineteenth century's huge confidence in the perfectibility of the world. Is Moe falling into irrationalist postmodern despair? I don't think so. I think this play is political, because it thinks the world is perfectible but is everywhere viciously imperfect.

Because, for all its madness, this is a crystal clear picture of what is wrong with our world. Pomona, the place, is described more than once as 'a hole in the middle of the city' (pp. 19, 44). Zeppo thinks it's what the world will be like in a few thousand years (p. 19), but I don't think the play reckons we'll have to wait that long. The city itself is empty and desolate, as if Pomona is a hole in the middle of a hole: Charlie's RPG begins in the middle of a crowded city but 'People push past you as if you're not there. It's a cold and lonely city, and you're not here by choice' (p. 42). More than one character admits to having no friends. Moe's violent streak means that he dare not touch anyone, which seems to grow into a general image of atomisation: 'I feel very disconnected,' he confesses (p. 89). But he has violent tendencies, he admits; his touch is murderous. The vision of the world is brutal: 'The whole world hates women,' says Fay. 'Maybe. Not me,' retorts Moe though he will eventually kidnap her to kill her (p. 91). The world is just 'a cycle of shit,' says Moe, 'A drowning in oceans of piss' (p. 102). At the end, Seagull-Zeppo announces his plan to shit on the entire world, to cover everything in his own faeces. Charlie's more benignly intended but still grotesque desire is to cover everything in the world with a thin layer of his own 'jizz' . He insists: 'not in a sexy way. It wouldn't be sexy' (p. 48), suggesting that a cultural imagination where extreme pornography has become normalised, almost desexualised. His belief that somehow, in doing so, he would be healing the world, spreading out his 'lifeforce' (p. 49), shows how misshapen an ordinary spirit of altruism has become. This is benevolence as bukkake.

We shift between layers throughout; from dream to nightmare, from memory to imagination, from reality to fantasy. It's extremely skilful and very precise. The writing is also extremely funny. The confidence of Alistair McDowall's writing here is remarkable. And the production - yes, sorry, I've left the production till last and will probably say far too little about it. Ned Bennett has found a shape for the show that maps hauntingly over the play and brings it to ghostly half-life. The jaw-dropping moment where Ollie appears in jump cuts across the stage is as genuinely unsettling as anything I've seen in the theatre - it reshapes the dimensions of the theatre somehow (and Elliott Griggs' lighting is key to this).  Georgia Lowe's set sinks a square trough into the Orange Tree stage, adverting to the underground world of the play but also the sense of a drained, exhausted and derelict world. The performers run at the play with conviction and precision and attack: there's not a weak link here. 

The play is disorientating, purposefully. The production is too. The ghosts of characters that layer over each other are also felt in the uncanny layering of imagined inner-city Manchester on the leafy suburbia of Richmond. It's been widely reported that there have been walk-outs, letters of denunciation, and protests by some of the Orange Tree's regular and conventional audience. Well, shame on them. They are privileged to have this stunning vision of our world premiering at their theatre. Fortunately, the new Orange Tree is trying to build another audience. Tickets for the under-30s are £10. Please support this production. It's nearly finished its run. You only have one more week to see the play of the decade,

Chekhov at School

I've written a version of Chekhov's Three Sisters for schools. Why the hell have you done that, Dan? Well, the immediate spur was my wife, Lilla, who is a teacher, wanting to direct a straight play at her school. I suggested Three Sisters and once we'd looked again at the play and thought about her school which stops at GCSE, she thought the play needed to be adapted. So I volunteered to do it.

It's been an interesting exercise and not one I've undertaken lightly. I love this play. But it took me a while to see what the fuss was about. In fact it was only when I saw the Gate Theatre production that came to the Royal Court in 1989 that it all lit up for me. The production featured the three Cusack sisters (Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh) alongside their father - and my strong impression was that they weren't getting on; this may have just been terrific acting, but they seemed to be irritated being on stage together, occasionally upstaging one another, and generally coming across a rather dislikeable. And so of course the whole play came alive. Once you realise that Chekhov's characters aren't there to be liked, the play opens right up. (I'd recently seen two production of The Cherry Orchard, one with Ranevskaya played by national treasure Judi Dench and another where she was played by Thelma Barlow (aka Mavis Riley off Coronation Street, in neither case was there any room to have anything other than sympathetic pity for the protagonist's plight.) Once you get that the play's gaze on its characters may be critical, even satirical, the plays become funnier, more politically robust, and the moments of pathos much smarter and harder-won.

So I've written a version that tries to clarify and emphasise those elements. It emphasises the humour; it moves a little more quickly than the original; the emotions are, I hope, not oversimplifies but their outlines are clearer and sharper, perhaps easier for a teenage cast and audience to grasp. I've made the decision to keep it in period, roughly. I have no problem whatever with radical updates (like Benedict Andrews's brilliant version for the Young Vic [pictured above]), but in this instance I wanted to retain a sense of the play in period for the cast. They might find ways to update it through the design anyway. But I've tried to de-cobweb the language so it feels like these are people we know speaking to us. There are a couple of swears, but these can be modified.

Anyway, any teachers looking to do a great classic play with some really great parts for girls, you might like to give this a read. No charge for use but do let me know if it's happening. Download it here.