DISASTER OF THE DECADE

crisis and related political instability were forcefully felt in canny Shakespeare revivals: at the National, Nicholas Hytner was on the money with a modern Timon of Athens (2012), which starred Simon Russell Beale as the spendthriftturned-bankrupt misanthrope. In a plethora of King Lears, we gazed at the disintegration of the kingdom, and engulfing madness. At the new Bridge Theatre, Hytner’s promenade Julius Caesar (2018) immersed us in civic strife, collapse and war.

New writers had keen antennae, too. Laura Wade delivered an early, stinging swipe at the Cameron-era

VIVA FOREVER!, PICCADILLY THEATRE, 2012

It looked like a nobrainer to stick the Spice Girls’ back catalogue on stage, but the script by Jennifer Saunders forgot to apply wit or much emotional intelligence. The show didn’t viva forever, it closed after just six months, having lost millions. “I really, really wanted this terrible show to stop,” the Telegraph wailed.

Tories with her group portrait of noxious Bullingdon Club types trashing a joint (but preserving their reputations) in Posh (2010). Looking at those at the bottom of the ladder, left behind in the austerity era, Alexander Zeldin wrote and directed an eye-opening trilogy about workers on zerohours contracts (Beyond Caring, 2015), temporary accommodation (LOVE, 2016) and a community centre (Faith, Hope and Charity, 2019); all staged at the National under Hytner’s less populist but artistically steadfast successor, Rufus Norris. Migration was a recurrent preoccupation – and no one dealt with it better than

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, who achieved an unforgettable recreation of the sprawling migrant camp at Calais (from inception to demolition) in The Jungle (2017), inviting the audience to sit amid refugees and asylum seekers.

James Graham usurped David Hare’s place as our state-of-thenation playwright. His National breakthrough This House (2012) took us inside the Commons and its pressure-cooker whips’ offices during the mid-Seventies, a period of wafer-thin majorities and chronically unstable government. Graham (Ink, Quiz, more besides) was part of a generation arriving on the scene without an axe to grind but with a keen interest in how things work – or don’t.

He had a close rival in Mike Bartlett, who deployed iambic verse to conjure a nation in post-Elizabethan chaos in King Charles III (2014), and allegorically encapsulated the sense of loss and grief lurking behind the

Brexit vote in Albion (2017). Both were crowned with superlative performances – from the late Tim Pigott-Smith in the former, from Victoria Hamilton in the latter. And both were at the matchlessly intelligent Almeida, run by Rupert Goold alongside the trailblazing Robert Icke.

Icke – influenced by the nearubiquitous Belgian director