Toby Young

In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made a speech in which he quoted Bernard Levin describing John as ‘the nicest man in London’ and, afterwards, John got up and said the thing he’d enjoyed the most about the job was ‘getting to know you lot’. I’m now retiring myself, but I can’t say that getting to know my colleagues has been the best part of the job.

Some playwrights mellow with age, but not David Hare. His sense of righteous indignation knows no bounds. According to press reports, the reason he decided to open his latest play on Broadway is that he still bears a grudge against Nicholas Hytner for refusing to schedule more performances of Stuff Happens at the National. Alas, The Vertical Hour got a fairly lukewarm review in the all-important New York Times, though it remains to be seen whether Hare will publicly attack the critic concerned, as he did when Frank Rich gave The Secret Rapture the thumbs-down in 1989. Hare’s irascibility is on full display in Peter Hall’s revival of Amy’s View, a play that had its debut at the National in 1997.

Connie Fisher, the winner of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s search-for-a-star reality TV show, hits the ground running in The Sound of Music. Indeed, she’s so high energy, it’s as if she’s starring in an infomercial rather than a West End musical. She overdoes everything, right down to the smallest hand gesture. As contestants in reality shows are fond of saying, she gives it ‘one hundred and ten per cent’. I imagine this is exactly what Lloyd Webber was hoping for when he came up with How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

Listing page content here I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than crude summaries of the original novels, almost as if they’ve been designed to help GCSE English students revise for their exams. But on the other, they’re undoubtedly theatrical, retelling these famous stories on stage in ways that are often very imaginative. Jane Eyre, which is the most famous example of Shared Experience’s work, is a case in point.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas, contains one of the most famous stage directions in modern drama: ‘They cross the Andes.’ On the face of it, these four words are completely preposterous. How could a theatre company possibly create the illusion that a 4,000-strong army is crossing a mountain range? Yet there was method in Shaffer’s madness. By including a stage direction that was impossible to follow naturalistically, he was forcing directors, actors, set designers, and so on to fall back on their ingenuity.

Listing page content here At the matinée performance of Donkeys’ Years I attended, Michael Frayn was seated in the row behind me. Seeing this revival of a sex farce he wrote in 1977 must have been an odd experience for him, not least because he more or less single-handedly killed off the genre with Noises Off in 1982. I don’t mean commercially, of course — Ray Cooney is still capable of putting bums on seats — I mean artistically. Noises Off deconstructed the Whitehall farce with such clinical precision that Frayn made it virtually impossible for any self-respecting playwright to try his hand at the genre again. It was the farce-to-end-all-farces.

According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which had actually closed by the time Harold Hobson’s favourable review appeared in the Sunday Times. (According to legend, one matinée was attended by just six people.) The Crucible, too, passes this test: its initial Broadway run in 1953 was not a success and no critic was willing to stake his reputation on the play’s merit.

The Old Country, an Alan Bennett play that dates back to 1977, covers much the same ground as An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The central character is clearly based on one of the Cambridge Spies — in this case, a former Foreign Office official called Hilary, who is rotting away in the Soviet Union while pining for the comforts of home. This figure — the ruling-class dissident overcome with nostalgia for the country he’s betrayed — clearly fascinates Bennett. Does he see a parallel between his experience as a semi-closeted homosexual and the secret life of the Cambridge Spies? Or is this figure simply a handy way of dramatising Bennett’s own ambivalence about Britain — loathing it and loving it at the same time?

Has Harold Pinter become too dominant a figure? I’m not just talking about the trophies he’s picked up in the past 12 months — the Wilfred Owen prize, the Franz Kafka prize, the Nobel prize, the Europe Theatre prize — but, more worryingly, the fact that so many new British playwrights seem content to ape Pinter’s idiosyncratic style. There was a time, not so long ago, when a writer wouldn’t be regarded as having arrived until he’d discovered his own voice. Typically, this process would involve him in an Oedipal struggle with the most important writers of his age, a phenomenon famously documented in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom’s study of the romantic poets.

Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to congratulate the writer, David Harrower, on his ‘bold’ choice of subject matter. They like playwrights who don’t pander to commercial interests — it demonstrates how serious they are about their craft. In addition, Harrower’s attitude to paedophilia is complex and nuanced — he refuses to condemn the middle-aged perpetrator, even though his victim was only 12 when he had sex with her.

It’s been 44 years since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made its debut on Broadway, but it still seems extraordinarily fresh. Why? The obvious answer is that the subject matter — the battle of the sexes — is timeless. Anyone in a heterosexual relationship will experience a shudder of recognition at certain points during a performance of this play, if not all the way through. But I don’t think that’s the reason. Rather, it’s because Albee’s ear for dialogue is so good. His ability to capture the rhythms and cadences of the way people speak is uncanny. Paradoxically, even though Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

When I started writing this column in 2001 I didn’t have much time for the theatre. As a child of the Thatcherite Eighties, I regarded state funding of the arts as a ruse cooked up by the liberal intelligentsia to obtain cheap tickets, and thought of theatre people as effete intellectual snobs who spent their time congratulating each other on being so much more cultured and intelligent than the rest of us. Whenever Jonathan Miller appeared on television, I turned it off. Four years later, I’ve had such a complete change of heart that I felt like one of the luckiest men alive as I sat in an abandoned factory in Southwark watching a production of Sunday in the Park With George, a Stephen Sondheim musical that even Sondheim aficionados regard as difficult.

Since taking on this job four years ago, I’ve reviewed 289 plays of which, perhaps, 50 have been worth seeing. Of these, only about ten have been truly outstanding and, of these, only five as close to perfection as it’s possible to get in the theatre. Pillars of the Community, a full-scale production of one of Ibsen’s lesser-known plays at the National, belongs in this latter category. It is, quite simply, one of the best things I’ve ever seen in the theatre. To begin with, there’s the writing. Shakespeare might be a better poet and Chekhov may be capable of summoning deeper feelings, but, in terms of sheer mastery of the craft, Ibsen has no equal.

One of the hardest things about being a drama critic, at least for me, is that so many plays stubbornly resist categorisation — and Shoot the Crow by the Northern Irish writer Owen McCafferty is a prime example. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Is it a proper, grown-up piece that wants to be taken seriously or a commercial production designed to put bums on seats? Is it high art or low entertainment? It starts off as a fairly conventional West End comedy. We’re introduced to two pairs of Irish builders, one pair played by Conleth Hill and James Nesbitt, the other by Packy Lee and Jim Norton. The plot is set in motion when each pair decides to steal an unrecorded shipment of tiles from under the other pair’s noses.

Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is slightly wrong. Their accents are too adenoidal, almost as if they’re extras in an am-dram production of Fiddler on the Roof, and they use so many Yiddish words you get the impression that each member of the cast has swallowed a Yiddish–English dictionary. (My wife, whose father is a secular north London Jew, was as unfamiliar with these words as the rest of the audience.

Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to see it now will inevitably expect it to throw some light on the question of what makes someone become a suicide bomber. Can any play, however illuminating, withstand such intense scrutiny? Fortunately, Talking to Terrorists is more or less up to the task.