Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s

Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

Aleks Sierz, Philip Roberts, Richard Boon, Philip Roberts, Richard Boon

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781408129265
• eBook ISBN: 9781408157121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

British theatre of the 1990s witnessed an explosion of new talent and presented a new sensibility that sent shockwaves through audiences and critics. What produced this change, the context from which the work emerged, the main playwrights and plays, and the influence they had on later work are freshly evaluated in this important new study in Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series. The 1990s volume provides a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who emerged and had a significant impact on British theatre: Sarah Kane (by Catherine Rees), Anthony Neilson (Patricia Reid), Mark Ravenhill (Graham Saunders) and Philip Ridley (Aleks Sierz). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1990s.

CHAPTER 1
THEATRE IN THE 1990s

Esme I have my life here in this theatre. My life is when the curtain goes up. My work is my life. I understand nothing else.

– David Hare, Amy’s View, 1997

Background

Fall of the Berlin Wall

One of the key global events that defined the 1990s happened on 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. On that date, the Communist East German government announced that all its citizens could visit West Germany, sparking off mass celebrations that signified the end of the Cold War (the worldwide conflict that had savagely divided a democratic and capitalist West from a totalitarian and Communist East since the end of the Second World War in 1945). Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had split Germany in two since 1961, the country was reunited on 3 October 1990, while, further east, the Soviet Union disintegrated and finally collapsed in 1991. These massive changes in the geo-political system led to what was widely seen as a New World Order. Some commentators, such as Francis Fukuyama, enthusiastically and prematurely announced the ‘End of History’ and the triumph of the capitalist system. Fukayama’s pronouncements find an echo in Mark Ravenhill’s ironical 1997 play Faust Is Dead, in which Alain, the philosopher character, argues not only that history has ended, but also that ‘Man is dead’.¹

New World Order

Instead of a Cold War stand-off between two superpowers, the New World Order consisted of the USA as the one major superpower, while the Soviet Union fragmented into one large country, Russia, and several smaller independent states, such as Georgia and Kazakhstan. Likewise, the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe changed the political map of the continent. These changes provoked responses such as Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali’s Moscow Gold (1990), a play about power struggles in the Soviet Union told in a living newspaper style, and Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest (1990), about the Romanian revolution which toppled the Communist regime in that country. China remained politically Communist even while its leaders allowed a market economy to flourish. If, elsewhere, the decade started off optimistically, with the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the ending of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, soon local conflicts reasserted themselves. Although some politicians spoke of a peace dividend, what actually happened was a series of small wars which had devastating local effects. The Middle East remained a flashpoint. The first Gulf War, fought by a US-led Coalition against Saddam Hussein, resulted in his expulsion from Kuwait and his containment in Iraq. During the 1990s, the Middle East Peace Process made some progress with the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, signed in 1993. But, in Africa, the genocidal conflict in Rwanda in 1994 cost the lives of some 800,000 people. In Afghanistan, the Taliban, a radical Islamist grouping, took power in 1996. In the former Soviet Union, the brutal first Chechen war was fought by separatists in Chechnya who wanted independence from Moscow. In Europe, the Bosnian civil war (which influenced Sarah Kane’s Blasted) lasted from 1992 to 1995, with horrific casualties and atrocities. As well as Bosnia, there were other problems in Europe. Widespread migration from the developing world and the former Eastern Europe, plus arguments over European political integration in the EU, created social tensions. Alive to these changes, David Edgar examined the new state of the world with The Shape of the Table (National, 1990) – which looked at the transition from Communism to capitalism in a fictional East European state – and Pentecost (RSC, 1994) – which examined cultural conflict in the new Europe – while David Greig’s debut Europe (Traverse, 1994) focused on migration and European identity.

Major followed by Blair

In the UK, most of the decade was overshadowed by John Major’s Conservative government, which became rapidly unpopular during the economic recession of 1990–1, a downturn costing thousands of people their jobs and their homes. Things got even worse when, after the Maastricht Treaty, the Conservative Party was split by furious arguments over Europe. The government continued Thatcher’s policy of privatisation by selling off the railways in 1993, although it refrained from introducing university fees. Despite Major’s efforts to promote a nation at ease with itself, his government became mired in sleaze and scandal, creating a climate of cynicism and apathy. On the Labour side, the reforms of the party begun by Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, and alluded to by David Hare in his semi-fictional Absence of War (National, 1993), failed to win him the 1992 election, but were continued by Tony Blair, who rebranded the party as ‘New Labour’. Dropping the historic Clause Four of the party’s constitution (which advocated nationalisation) in 1995, Blair moved the party on to the centre ground of British politics and narrowed the ideological gap between it and the Conservatives. Not everyone welcomed this move: one of the displayed scene titles in Caryl Churchill’s This is a Chair (Royal Court, 1997) was ‘The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right’. In 1997, Blair was elected prime minister in a spectacular landslide victory. His youthful image was enhanced by stories of his guitar-playing past and by the fact that his son Leo was the first baby to be born to a serving post-war British prime minister. Among the elements of continuity between the Major and Blair administrations, the most important was the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, which gradually ended some thirty years of armed conflict. Constitutionally, the partial devolution of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland went forward, and the first steps to reform the hereditary House of Lords were taken. The first significant measure of the new government was the handing of policy over monetary control to the Bank of England, which signalled a light-touch attitude to regulating banking and credit. The first of Blair’s wars was fought when he successfully advocated the NATO bombing of Serbia to force it to withdraw from neighbouring Kosovo.

Nineties culture

In the 1990s, despite the long political dominance of the Conservatives (who had been in power since 1979), there was a real sense of cultural change. Regardless of all the hype, the arrival of Britpop, Brit film and Cool Britannia contributed to a sense of cultural confidence, while the election of Blair brought a feeling of a new dawn, with the image of the nation rebranded as youthful, bright and optimistic. At the same time, British youth culture continued to be influenced by a darker sensibility, especially from North America. For example, the Canadian Douglas Coupland’s 1991 cult novel Generation X had an enormous influence, becoming a book that ‘distils the spirit of a moment and comes to represent a particular time’.² Such blank generation literature offered a more disenchanted view of the world to set against the pervading currents of optimism. This was also a time when the huge forces of globalisation, which expanded mental horizons as well as economic markets, made a powerful impact on Britain, while artistic responses to these new realities took many forms: a retreat into private concerns, a dismissive cynicism or a renewed criticism of consumer capitalism. All of these were present in British theatre of the time.

Heritage, culture and the Arts Council

In 1990, the system of arts funding in Britain was the traditional post-war cultural settlement of using the Arts Council of Great Britain, an arm’s length public body, to distribute government subsidy to individual institutions in partnership with local authorities and, increasingly, with business sponsors. The effect of cuts in state subsidy during the Thatcher-led 1980s was twofold: first, it made the whole theatre system increasingly driven by commercial objectives and, second, it encouraged an embattled psyche, what critic Michael Billington called ‘a siege-mentality, excessive prudence and the sanctification of the box-office’.³ As well as state subsidy, local authorities also funded theatres, and this sometimes led to problems: when the Merseyside Metropolitan Council was abolished by the Thatcher government, its successor was unwilling to subsidise Liverpool’s theatres, so the Liverpool Playhouse almost went bankrupt in 1990 was dark in 1998–2000, while the Liverpool Everyman closed in 1993.

During the 1990s, two important innovations were brought in by the Major government: the Department of National Heritage and the National Lottery. The Department of National Heritage was Britain’s first ministry for culture, responsible for the performing arts, film, museums, galleries, heritage, sport and tourism, while the Lottery rapidly became a national institution, whose weekly draws were broadcast on primetime television and which distributed its profits to the arts, charities and good causes. These two new institutions symbolise the spirit of the Conservative 1990s: on the one hand, the new government department offered a cosy, patriotic idea of heritage and historical tradition; on the other, the Lottery suggested a casino economy which mocked enterprise culture, and was regressive because the poor bought the most tickets while the middle classes benefited most from Lottery awards.

Conservative government policy was inconsistent. Timothy Renton, Minister for the Arts in 1991, publicly contemplated abolishing the Arts Council but, in the run-up to the 1992 General Election, actually increased its funding to £194 million, so theatre subsidy rose by 14 per cent. The Arts Council was thus able to bail out the RSC, which had accumulated deficits and had been forced to shut its Barbican base in London for four months in November 1990. Then, in mid-decade, Arts Council funding was cut again. Meanwhile, the organisation was restructured. By April 1994 ten Regional Arts Boards were created and clients were distributed between a central office (National Theatre, RSC and Royal Court) and the RABs (regional theatres). At the same time, ‘many of the specialist units that the Arts Council had developed in the eighties to promote general policies such as cultural diversity, the role of women in the arts and attention to disability, were wound up’.⁴ In 1993, the last year of the old Arts Council of Great Britain, this body tried various cost-cutting measures – such as reducing funding to ten theatres outside London – which all failed, and meant that the Arts Council lost the confidence of both government and its own clients. In 1994, the Arts Councils of Scotland and Wales were devolved, to be funded directly by the Scottish and Welsh Offices, and the London headquarters became Arts Council England. This restructuring was less important than pervasive fear of cuts to the arts’ budget.

Following the Thatcher years, business sponsorship remained a vital ingredient of arts funding. By the early 1990s, government was aiding business sponsorship by topping up private deals: ‘by 1994 the government had contributed twenty-one million pounds, in response to forty-three million in sponsorship’.⁵ But business sponsorship fell during periods of economic recession. Still, the trend of the 1990s was for corporate sponsors (often from the financial sector) to become a vital part of every major theatre’s core funding. In 1994, when the RSC concluded six years of sponsorship by Royal Insurance, it made a fresh deal with Allied Lyons worth £3 million over three years. This was, says Robert Hewison, ‘the largest arts sponsorship deal in Britain’.⁶ On a smaller scale, Barclays bank sponsored the Royal Court’s annual festival of experimental new work. But such deals provoked controversies that even affected educational charities: when in 1998 a £3 million grant by the Jerwood Foundation to the Royal Court was made conditional on the theatre adding the name Jerwood to both its auditoriums, there was an outcry. Despite such bitter disputes, the main trends were those of increasing sponsorship and commercialisation.

In 1993, the new Department of National Heritage, in charge of the Arts Council, seemed to herald an optimistic future. After all, it had an arts lover, David Mellor, as its Secretary of State. Similarly, the National Lottery, launched at the end of 1994, promised ‘to initiate the biggest expansion in cultural activity since the sixties’.⁷ What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot. It was typical of the sleazy image of the Major government that Mellor soon resigned because of a sex scandal involving an actress, Antonia de Sanchez. And the Lottery was such an enormous, and unexpected, success that the Arts Council found itself distributing £340 million of Lottery arts funding (for capital projects such as building refurbishment) compared to £191 million of regular arts funding (for running costs).⁸ The huge sums of money made available by the Lottery allowed new theatre building projects, such as the refurbishment of the Royal Court Theatre (completed in 2000). But decreases in core funding created ‘the paradox of cultural institutions dying of revenue thirst while drowning in lakes of capital funding’.⁹ Major’s last Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley recognised that the arts had been underfunded, with theatre outside London alone carrying deficits of £8 million, and she set up a stabilisation fund in 1997 to bail out the worst-hit theatres.

The advent of New Labour in 1997 reversed some cuts, but added lots of spin. The Blair government changed the name of the Department of National Heritage to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and its first Secretary of State Chris Smith played a boosterish role in hyping the Blair government’s cultural credentials: his book of speeches was called Creative Britain. Although this was part of what Jen Harvie calls ‘a crucial paradigm shift’, moving from talking about culture as art to marketing it as ‘creative industries’, the new government also did some good. For example, it commissioned the Boyden Report to look at the problems of theatre outside London.¹⁰ Thus the benefits of New Labour policies would be reaped in the new millennium.

By the end of the decade, following twenty years of glorifying the market, two trends were of the utmost importance: first, the mixed economy of funding – part state subsidy, part business sponsorship and part box office – was in crisis, especially in respect to theatres outside London. Second, the entire theatre funding system had been thoroughly commercialised, so that even subsidised companies were under pressure to be successful businesses. The outward signs of this were everywhere: theatres rebranded themselves, acquired logos, learnt to use niche marketing, made sponsorship deals, redesigned their foyers and expanded their bar activities. Audiences became customers, and shows became product. The box office was king.¹¹ Added to this was a new creed: the arts should be assessed on their social impact: the hunt was on for new audiences and greater access. Within theatres, commercial pressure undermined the traditional relationship between directors and theatrical institutions, creating what Billington describes as a freelance culture in which directors found themselves in an open market: ‘Where in the past it had been companies and buildings that possessed a defining aesthetic, now that was something imported by individual directors who came bearing their own particular brand and style.’¹² But how did these changes affect the shows that theatres put on?

Flagship theatres: West End, National and RSC

The mainstream theatre landscape was divided between a commercial West End and a subsidised sector which was headed by the National Theatre and the RSC. In the mid-1990s, theatre suddenly, if briefly, became part of Cool Britannia, when publications such as Newsweek, Le Monde and the London Evening Standard hyped London as both the theatre capital of the world and Europe’s coolest city. As one epitome of traditional Englishness, Country Life magazine, put it: ‘London is the greatest theatre city in the world – the West End has twice as many theatres as Broadway.’¹³ Certainly, it is true that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• General Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Living in the 1990s
• 1 Theatre in the 1990s
• 2 Playwrights and Plays
• 3 Documents
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Imprint