Amnesia and the Royal Court
Monday, August 17th, 2009
When German critics write about new British drama they almost invariably only refer to the Royal Court. This is partly due to the strong exchange ties between the Court and the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. The latter’s Thomas Ostermeier in an interview went as far as to proclaim Patrick Marber a product of Sloane Square, although Marber’s early progress was due to the National Theatre Studio. Even Stephen Daldry’s groundbreaking in-yer-face-theatre season of 1994/5 was co-produced by the Studio and owed much to work originally developed there but released to the Court as the National did not see a chance for it in one of his own theatres. This is hardly ever mentioned over here, just as the fact that in the early 1990s new writing-wise venues like the Bush and the Traverse had been more at the forefront than the Royal Court. David Greig rightly cites Simon Donald’s “The Life of Stuff” from 1992 as an example of a Scottish in-yer-face-play before the term was invented which simply had come too early. Anthony Neilson had already started his career, and the stage version of “Trainspotting” made it to the West End before Daldry started to “listen to the kids”.
British drama in the 1990s had a huge formal breadth. But this range was not exactly recognised in the German theatre which tended to reduce the label new British writing to Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. The playwright Theresia Walser accordingly claimed in an interview the work of her British colleagues was peopled by “whores, pushers, rentboys and the unemployed wanking into socks whilst watching porn and cutting off their breasts and various other bits into the bargain”. This kind of prejudice led to the neglecting of quieter and often more differentiated plays and their less medially ubiquitous authors. After all, the Royal Court’s biggest commercial success of the period had been Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” which would have greatly surprised Theresia Walser. Despite a fine German premiere at the State Theatre Stuttgart the play failed to have a similar impact as “Shopping and Fucking” or “Blasted”.
As the Royal Court continued to be seen as the main new writing-theatre after Stephen Daldry’s departure and during the increasingly lacklustre Ian Rickson-years even the astonishing boom in Scotland was mostly overlooked by German theatres and newspapers. When the Guardian in 2002 published a list with the ten most promising British dramatists, no less than four of them were Scots: Zinnie Harris, Gregory Burke, David Harrower and Douglas Maxwell. Fiachra Gibbons, Edinburgh-correspondent for the same paper, referred to “the most exciting generation of playwrights in a century”. Apart from Burke and Harrower she named Henry Adam and David Greig as its prime exponents. So hopefully the British Council Showcase at this month’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival will help some of its German participants to redress the balance. At least at the Traverse they will not have to endure interminable priapic odes by Wally Shawn.
