Alexander Cohen

Commercial success has a way of corroding critical regard. The more popular a playwright becomes, the more the critical establishment becomes suspicious of their intellectual credentials. Consider Peter Shaffer. He collected Tonys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a CBE and a knighthood, and yet his reputation has contracted to a single work. Shaffer’s Amadeus premièred at the National Theatre in London in 1979. A West End transfer followed, then Broadway. But it was Milos Forman’s 1984 film that propelled it into the stratosphere, embedding itself so completely in our cultural consciousness that the rest of his work has never quite escaped its shadow. Shaffer’s work resists easy categorisation.

Poor John Dennis. In 1709, the playwright devised a novel technology to simulate thunder to accompany his drama Appius and Virginia. The play flopped and was promptly booted out of the theatre. To add salt to the wound, Dennis’s thunder-generating technique was stolen and inserted into a staging of Macbeth. He accused the producers of ‘stealing his thunder’, birthing the phrase that has long outlived his work. Stage technology has come a long way since. Directors have a toy box of high-tech smoke and mirrors at their disposal. Perhaps it’s more of a Pandora’s box. Live on-stage cameras are particularly in vogue. Watch them crawling all over Jamie Lloyd’s monotone Romeo and Juliet and Ivo van Hove’s ill-fated Opening Night. They’re even parodied in Inside No.