The National Theatre General Thread

Sorry, no.  Advance is Monday 26th.

Interesting points.  In thirty-five years of theatre-going I don't think I've seen a convincing Lorca play here (I missed the Simon Stone-Billie Piper Yerma).  I'm hoping Rebecca Frecknall can do something interesting with it.  I've seen brilliant Chekhov, Gorki, Ibsen, Brecht, Schiller, Moliere, Racine, Lope de Vega but Lorca doesn't seem to travel well - or have I just missed something?  I must say Pirandello is another author whose work has never really travelled - I'm sure the plays are great, but I've never seen a production worthy of his reputation.  

I'd say the Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega done by Declan Donellan in the Cottesloe in 1988/89 was truly fabulous and I have vague memories of what struck me then as an excellent Young Vic production of Peribanez directed by a young Rufus Norris in 2003. Complicité did a very good job with The Chairs in the late 90s with Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan. But your larger point stands. Some things don't translate well.

There are presumably UK writers for whom the same applies - though given how popular UK writing is abroad there are perhaps not many. I don't imagine Terence Rattigan strikes many chords in France and Germany for example. I think the same is true for Alan Bennett.

Equally there are writers who are more highly valued abroad than they are at home. That may apply to contemporary writers like David Harrower and Simon Stephens who seem very highly in demand in Germany. I always used to think that novelist Lawrence Durrell was more highly regarded in France than the UK. Of course, some people are just lucky with their translators.

I saw an mesmerising production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, back in 2008. It was directed by Rupert Goold and had, I believe, Denise Gough and Ian McDiarmid in it. I was thinking about it for many days after I saw it.

The prime example of a living English playwright who has a huge reputation abroad (France and Germany in this case) but whose work hardly ever gets staged here these days (quite understandably in my view) is Edward Bond. Some of our younger readers have probably never heard of him.

Howard Barker another one.  His Scenes from an Execution was brilliant but the other couple of things I've seen were very hard work.  

Yes, I just missed the RSC Red Noses, but saw the War Plays in the Barbican pit when I was a teenager with Ian McDiarmid and Gary Oldman in the cast (it was the production film director Alex Cox saw when casting Sid and Nancy).

The tedious old Marxist could shut any theatre in the country but they like that sort of thing in France. Here he is explaining why he wouldn't want any of his plays done by the NT in an interview with old Billers:

"Take the last guy who ran the National Theatre. I don’t know his name …”

Sir Nicholas Hytner?

“Was it him? Puppets? Was he the puppets one?”

{This seems to be a reference to War Horse, adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, which ran for two years at the National, seven in the West End and is now touring the UK}.

“Yes. That was an obscenity. Black Beauty goes to war. What is wrong with our society? That is obscene! And it goes around the world.”

And in film Norman Wisdom is still a national hero in Albania. 

A reverse example is that Arthur Miller was ignored in USA for many years around the 1970-80s and found it hard to get his new plays produced while his reputation was still high in UK. 

And of course a lot of European writers who are regarded as major figures in Europe don't get a serious look-in over here. They tend to be done in studio productions or not at all, rather than being put on at prestigious national houses with big name casts. I must admit I can understand why - I have seen plays by people like Peter Handke, Botho Strauss, Elfriede Jelinek, Bernard-Marie Koltes and they are all very oblique, fragmentary, difficult in that modern way, which even I who likes to think himself open to modern art find challenging and ultimately unengaging. The French authors who have been successful in recent years in the UK, Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller, write much more straightforward plays, often very witty social comedies, which go down much better over here (and are translated by the very witty Christopher Hampton). One thing that has been so unusual about the success of Stefano Massini's The Lehman Trilogy is that it is a translated contemporary play. It is a rare success where the author's name is less well known than the director too. No one say's 'I'm going to see Massini's The Lehman Trilogy'.

Oh, yes.  Someone (English Touring Theatre?) did The Golden Dragon a decade or so ago, directed by Ramin Gray, which I quite enjoyed.  Reading a review, to remind myself what it was about (a Chinese restaurant), it does sound little like the Icke The Doctor with its cross-age, cross-gender, cross-race casting.