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Predictability And Polemics Are Strangling British Theatre
We’re at a real low point in the creative arts and it’s difficult to know where to go from here.
A question I frequently get from enthusiastic young playwrights is about how and when I fell in love with theatre. The question has a hidden middle-class supposition nestled neatly beneath it. I didn’t watch a play until I was fourteen, and even then, it was a dry-as-hell version of Julius Caesar at the RSC in Stratford.
I wasn’t all that impressed.
I never fell in love with theatre. I fell in love with creativity and words as a form of philosophical self-expression, playwriting and, by extension, theatre, which was a sort of accidental happenstance. I’m from a small city at the wrong end of the country for ‘the arts.’ My hometown is the sort of place that still might’ve burned people at the stake in the 1980s for ‘making pretend and the devil’s work.’
My family do not go to the theatre. We aren’t those people
These days my parents will reluctantly attend the theatre to watch any plays I write, but we all know they don’t enjoy them as much as they pretend they do. My mother hates foul language — which I often pepper through my scripts, and my father finds ‘willing suspension of…
