British theatre, 1940–2002: an introduction

Abstract

British theatre in the second half of the twentieth century was probably more consistently volatile than at any other time in its long history. This is not surprising. After an initial collapse, the number and diversity of types of theatres and companies grew substantially, especially from the 1960s to the 1990s. Moreover, as theatre was still the art form most directly engaged in the public sphere through its face-to-face encounters in the live event, that growth gained energies from the huge cultural, social, political, economic and technological transformations that coursed around the globe as the millennium drew closer. Yet simultaneously the significance of theatre was subject to growing uncertainty and doubt, not least among the ranks of its practitioners. As other cultural forms – including performance – became ubiquitous, British theatre, despite its growth, seemed to lose much of its traditional authority in society. Then in the digital age that emerged in the final three decades of the century perhaps it faced its nemesis. The seductions of the new media not only vastly outstripped the theatre numerically, they also became insinuated into the production-consumption circuits of the live event itself, maybe inflecting its perceptual-cognitive processes with subtle confusions. When Nicole Kidman slipped out of her dress in The Blue Room , David Hare’s version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde at London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre in 1998, did the audience simply enjoy a mega-film-star in the raw, so to speak, or did the powerful qualities of her filmic persona make a kind of cross-media palimpsest of her flesh, especially as she was set on a ‘stage [that] shimmers in blue light and neon signs, with film captions and crackling electronic sounds to signal the time taken before orgasm’?