National Theatre risks “eroding culture” by wearing “semi-commercials” away from establishment principles.
The two-time Olivier Award winner described the playhouse shift from Repertoire Theatre, a system in which resident acting companies rotate plays despite the vision of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granbil Barker.
In 1904, Granville Barker called on the Blue Book to repertoire theater, which has “a resident company of 42 actors and 24 actresses.” When the theatre was founded under the direction of Laurence Olivier in 1963, he received a wish after death.
Due to funding cuts and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, venues feature a name that often draws attention to filling seats, in preparation for less plays on expansion runs.
“When the National Theatre drops its repertoire and it appears it has accomplished, you're eroding culture in a really deep way,” Hare told this cultural life on BBC Radio 4.
He states: “The National Theatre is meant to showcase world drama, but at this point it's not. It's doing semi-commercial runs and playing one after another. It's not a repertoire theater. It's not an art theater.
“Shaw and Granville-Barker created the idea for the National Theatre for the Art Theater. The National now produces a very small number of plays, everything is executed and there is no repertoire. So, six times a week I don't have days to see him play, and I think it's awful poverty.”
Hare called himself a “crime of the postwar repertoire,” and former artistic director Peter Hall Sir played his play in 1978 despite impressive reviews and closed it off the board. I remembered that I was instructed to do so. The play was later adapted into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep.
He said: “Until the end [of the run]it was full of standing ovations as the audience allowed them to reach it. Who curates such a play now? Who could have the money to curate the play? “
On the same show, he said that equally cautious regional theatres risk missing the next Harold Pinter.
He said it was “very difficult” for local artistic directors to “have failure at risk,” adding that subsidies to the community have some way to address this.
“If a particular writer believes that the region is the writer that is supposed to hear, or that the whole country should hear, it is very important to support that single writer to the extent they once supported John Osborne. It's difficult to do Edward Bond or Harold Pinter as the voices of their times. Such support is something that is lacking at this point.”
Granville-Barker is Shaw's Acolyte, and after playing for many of the latter productions, I turned to writing and directing. He wrote a book by Blue with critic William Archer in 1904.
The show once said: “Do the British want the National Theatre? Of course they don't. They don't want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey But they never wanted it.
“But when these things stand as mystical phenomena that come to them, they were very proud of them and they felt that the place would be incomplete without them.”
The National Theatre now says that “all across all three theatres, it is set in newer plays and new adaptations than any point in history, written by an unprecedented pool of playwrights.”
“The transition to “straight runs” rather than playing in a repertoire was a necessary change in the post-Covid financial environment, but this does not change the number of productions that are performed each year. “The National Theatre's commitment to writers and new writing is immovable.”
