Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright

Changing Stages: A View of British and American Theatre in the Twentieth Century

(Knopf, $40, 400 pp.)

“We have been handed the weapons of dissent—the video recorder and the remote control—and we use them without conscience or remorse, becoming habituated to byte-sized, time-shifted fragments. We’ve become hanging judges, impatient with any idea that takes more than a few minutes to develop, intolerant of space between words, of stillness and silence. All of which conspires to make the survival of the theatre more remarkable—and more desirable.”

Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright’s strong words bespeak truth. More and more, we’re encouraged to discriminate less and less. Movies and music and television are especially guilty as charged. Low art is everywhere. CDs are cranked out in home studios by the droves. Everybody’s a musician, it seems. Movies are rented from Blockbuster three and four in an evening. The daffy romantic comedy not moving fast enough? Eject it—then put in the sci-fi saga with CGI. For all its variety, television is too often still a vast wasteland. We dispose of our culture like cheeseburger wrappers. Yet through it all, the theater, both abroad and at home, survives and survives and survives. (It is not without irony, however, that the authors—both directors at the Royal National Theatre—are quick to acknowledge that this impressive volume comes into being because it is a tie-in project to a jointly produced BBC/PBS television series, which was recently broadcast in the U.S.)

The theater continues to have—courageously, but perhaps of necessity—its very own self-sustaining life, and as the Olivier Award-winning Eyre so astutely conveys in his foreword, it is “a figurative art, one which cannot excite or thrill or even entertain for more than a minute or two unless it’s about people, and unless the audience experiences those people as being real. Every worthwhile revolution in modern theatre has sprung from a desire to make that reality more profound, more complex, more like life as it really is, as opposed to how it’s supposed to be.”

Changing Stages has the shape and authority of a textbook, but it is hardly that. It eschews scholarly trappings and roars with unassailable insights about the trenchant developments and cutting-edge artists that have made up the British and American theatrical culture of the 20th century. The authors certainly make strongly worded artistic judgments, but these are all balanced by more important considerations of influence on the art form as a whole.

One can hardly mention the theater at all without talking of Shakespeare. Chapter 1 gets at the Bard with some interesting days-of-yore tidbits, but more so by way of how his works were staged in 20th-century England. Necessary focus is placed on the directors and actors—Tyrone Guthrie, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, etc.—whose work provided the world with a memorable modern sensibility of how important Shakespeare is to both theater’s past and future, and how the tradition of classical drama sustained Great Britain through the first half of the century and two world wars.

As the book details, this was a time also of the rise of history-making British theatrical companies—of a true repertory ethos—and the growing reality of government-subsidized art. Theater remained still a fairly elitist indulgence in England, but when Laurence Olivier started making feature films of, for example, Richard III, he “gave countless people of all ages access to Shakespeare, enfranchising whole swathes of the population who would otherwise have been excluded...by Britain’s obdurately embedded class system.”

Then the 20th century’s playwrights come at us fast and furious. Many important lessers are included throughout the text—far too many to mention—but touching on the innovators will suffice. Most prominently, native Irishmen (though hardly republicans) claimed the British stage—George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, and Sean O’Casey. From there, Eyre and Wright organize their chapters by trends, rather than with any deliberate attempt to stay strictly chronological (though coverage is linear nonetheless). With that, we get evaluations of the works of Noel Coward (light comedy), T.S. Eliot (verse drama), Terrence Rattigan and J.B. Priestley (social consciousness), the so-called angry young men of England’s 1950s (e.g., John Osborne), and the still challenging ellipticism of the absurdists (Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett). Even such “less successful” playwrights—but no less literary giants—as W. Somerset Maugham and D.H. Lawrence come under discussion.

There is an initial tendency to suppose this volume is a jingoistic Brit enterprise. And why not, since modern serious theater was practically invented in London? But once the authors shift gears to America, their admiration of the colonial contribution is all too apparent. Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams lead the charge of significant American writers, with Clifford Odets, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Sam Shepard, and others garnering consistently intelligent coverage that is backed by a respectful acknowledgment that the U.S. has led as often as it has followed. In this regard, the crowning achievement of the modern era of playwriting, on either side of the Atlantic, is declared to be Tony Kushner’s early ’90s Angels in America. Distinctively, the authors’ coverage of American dramatic literature is brought into sharp relief more so by which artists have been excluded from the book’s purview. It is definitely of note, for example, that early ’70s alternative playwright Megan Terry—little-produced today—grabs one mention but Neil Simon none at all.

Black American playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson also receive solid treatment. The American musical is lauded as well, with Eyre and Wright offering insightful description of its growth, development, and undeniable worldwide influence. (In this regard, Rodgers and Hammerstein still have the historical high ground, remaining the visionaries who paved the way for more modern musical landmarks such as Les Misérables or the entertainments of Andrew Lloyd Webber.)

Mostly, one is struck by the fact that these authors arrive at their analysis by way of critical focus on theatrical movements and the courageous personalities whose groundbreaking endeavors made more conventional stages hospitable to new dramatic possibilities. Perhaps the real story of a century’s worth of English-language theater is that of various producers and forward-thinking directors, who, when the climate of theatrical culture verged on stagnancy, plowed forward with new theories, new directorial styles, and in new venues, encouraging the works of new writers and inevitably sticking to their guns in the face of failure, critical attack, or continuous financial insecurity. In this realm, Eyre and Wright extol sometimes the art, but always the courage, of David Belasco, Lilian Baylis, Antonin Artaud, Edward Gordon Craig, Harley Granville-Barker, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht, Joan Littlewood, Hugh Beaumont, Cameron Mackintosh, and institutional lighthouses such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, the Living Theatre, the Old Vic, the Group Theatre, and New York’s Public Theatre.

Throughout, the text is able somehow to drop in, among its lofty and definitive declamations, amazing little anecdotes about larger-than-life figures. Who knew, for example, that Bernard Shaw (the great playwright disdained the “George,” you know) was most probably the son of his mother’s music teacher? Fascinating sidebars such as this add a distinct sense of human interest to the otherwise always artistically compelling coverage. In addition, 150 marvelous black-and-white photographs help bring the parade of personages and production styles into livelier focus.

Furthermore, there is an appreciative spirit in this volume, which seems to owe much to the legacy of the late, great British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, whose astute and serious words and viewpoints are cited often as a reliable authority. Tynan criticized with passion and care. He loved the theater, and his work set the standard by which legitimate critics are now judged.

While not all-encompassing, Eyre and Wright’s oh-so-readable volume is comprehensive. The breadth of coverage is generally indisputable. And it’s interesting to note that, after all the discussion of the century-long dramatic voyage, they conclude with the pronouncement that Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) is the best play of the century. Here is testimony yet again to the theater’s place as the one art form least susceptible to mere trend. Good drama exists within its time, but if it touches the human spirit, its shelf life may be forever.