The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
New kids on the block
British theatre now leads the rest of the world – which is a minor miracle given the squeeze on funding
In the cascade of theatrical moments from the past decade, which droplets do you want to cup hold of? James Corden making his entrance in One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), lobbing a peanut in the air and catching it in his mouth? Glenda Jackson baring her teeth in fury as King Lear (2016)? Patsy Ferran fluttering and hyperventilating in Summer and Smoke (2018)? Maggie
Smith, shifting uncomfortably in her seat as Brunhilde Pomsel, Goebbels’s secretary, in A German Life (2019)? It might even be something that happened before or after the show started – the winning mixture of bustle and laid-back good humour, say, that greeted audiences to Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles (2017) or Sir Ian McKellen rattling a bucket outside every venue his tour-de-force one-man show stopped off at this year.
There was much to admire, too much now to do easy justice to. Sheridan Smith lit up the Savoy in Funny Girl (2016), Imelda Staunton darkened it in the wild mania of Gypsy (2015), bravura turns both. “Just because you find that life’s not fair it/ Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it,” sang Roald Dahl’s Matilda for the first time, in 2010, and melted our hearts forever. There was Cumbermania – as Benedict played the Dane (2015); and Potter-mania, as Harry met a two-part theatrical sally into the West End in The Cursed Child (2016). We saw the Queen over the years in The Audience (2013), a young Rupert Murdoch incarnated in Ink (2017). We mourned anew the generation of men who died from Aids in Matthew Lopez’s overpowering epic The Inheritance (2018) and heard from women in history given short shrift in the past: Anne Boleyn, Nell Gwynn, Emilia Bassano.
The British economy may have been on its knees for much of this time, but British theatre walked with its head held high. It now stands globally pre-eminent, which may sound jingoistic – but, given the straitened funding circumstances, it’s a small miracle.
At some level, theatrical thinking matched the contours of national upset. To tell the story of the 2010s is to note how a mood of fracture and division crept in. All was not well, and the best theatre – at least that which deserves special recognition – captured this.
The decade was heralded by the defiant roar of Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the tatterdemalion, woods-dwelling anti-hero of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, the West End transfer of which was the talk of early 2010. This lord of misrule, brought to mesmeric life by Mark Rylance, tapped ancient roots of disobedience and embodied a mutiny stirring in England long before the Brexit vote.
The aftershocks of the economic
here could make much difference. Olivier imports one clever device, which is that when filming the opening scene he accidentally drops his princely coronet off the cushion being offered to receive it; a mistake he left in the film as a cogent metaphor for what happens. There are two sides to the story of Richard III, one of which is not to be seen or heard in the propagandistic vehicle Shakespeare created at a time when the Tudors needed validation in order to legitimise the Stuart succession to the ageing Elizabeth I. In the overacting and histrionic excess, I like to think the director himself knew that.