For lovers of British theatre, last week’s 1996 Flair Symposium was a dream
talking. The two-day event, Shouting in the Evening, sponsored by the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, brought together in one room some major
figures of the English stage to speak personally about their work in British
theatre and its importance in the past 40 years. Playwrights David Hare, Tom
Stoppard, and Timberlake Wertenbaker; actor-directors Frith Banbury and Janet
Suzman; critics Michael Billington and Mel Gussow; and scholars Ruby Cohn and
Oscar Brockett provided much personable and lively chat about the state of the
art.
Much of the time was spent debunking myths, beginning with the symposium
title. The phrase “shouting in the evening” had been attributed to actor
Michael Gambon, but in his keynote speech, Hare told the crowd that it actually
came from the son of actor David Tomlinson (best known in the U.S. for his
roles in such Disney films as Mary Poppins). Someone at the boy’s school
had wanted to know what his father did. When asked what he said, the boy
replied, “I told him the truth: you shout in the evening.”
Moving on to dispel the myth that today’s British theatre is in better shape
than American theatre, Hare expressed dismay over the lack of new plays and the
paucity of young directors willing to serve the playwright’s vision instead of
their own. Of late, he noted, “plays have been directed not for what they are
but for what they remind a director of.” Worse, he observed, musicals and
revivals of classics had crowded new plays out of the commercial London
theatre. That is disastrous for the art form, he warned: “If we lose the
ambition to be urgently contemporary, something vital has gone out of the
theatre.”
Stoppard was one of several speakers who challenged the conventional idea that
John Osborne’s drama Look Back in Anger singlehandedly changed British theatre
in 1956. “History doesn’t work like that on the whole, does it?” he asked. In
his chat with Gussow, Stoppard also confessed to some reportorial
sleight-of-hand from his days as a critic. The young Stoppard was covering an
event where Harold Pinter was in attendance. He followed Pinter and
surreptitiously took down the man’s remarks. Then he published “an exclusive
Harold Pinter interview that he had no idea had taken place.”
Perhaps the most spirited discussion was between Wertenbaker and Billington,
focusing on the past 15 years. Wertenbaker sought to dispel the idea that
British theatre had no women writers. There was an “explosion” of them in the
early Eighties, she insisted, but “this has gone totally unrecorded. The
critics weren’t there.” Billington sympathized before going on to challenge
Hare, arguing that new voices were being heard on Britain’s stages. He did
concur that new drama was still at risk, asking, “It’s always about survival,
isn’t it?”
Alas, the guests have flown back across the Big Pond, but the Shouting in the
Evening exhibition continues through January in the Leeds Gallery (fourth
floor, Flawn Academic Center, UT campus). For info, call 471-8944.
This article appears in November 15 • 1996 and November 15 • 1996 (Cover).