Unrevived great plays of the last 50 years

I'm not sure these have remained unrevived, but I do hope to see:

Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies

C. P. Taylor's Good

Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound

Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy

Oh, and if bringing back whole productions were possible, I'd be delighted to be able to see Thea Sharrock's After the Dance, and Michael Longhurst's Constellations. I just can't believe I missed them.

May 6, 2016 22:14:33 GMT Honoured Guest said:

My hunch is that most of the plays listed above seem not to lend themselves to a fresh directorial approach and so they're unlikely to be revived in today's theatre climate until they are much older and may become discoveries to a new generation. For now, they might be seen as a bit too stale and predictable.

Which plays of the last fifty years might interest Robert Icke or Ivo van Hove or Blanche McIntyre?

You say that, but who’d have read the frankly minor Arthur Miller that is A View from the Bridge, bearing in mind too how stubborn the Miller estate is, and gone “Gee, set this in a shiny box, have everyone barefoot, have Michael Gould skulking about looking tired, and that will be the show of the year!”? I loved last year’s Husbands and Sons, and in isolation those DH Lawrence plays are slight and dated, but give them to Marianne Elliot (the most underrated director working today?) and watch them shine. There’s no reason a Hampton, a Hare, a Stoppard, an Edgar wouldn’t work with a new directorial approach.

I’d love to see Rupert Goold do Wesker’s The Merchant, building from his re-interpretation of Shakespeare and bringing that to Wesker’s flawed reclamation of Shylock. I’d love to see van Hove do Bennett’s George III and treat it as grittily as he does Shakespeare’s kings. I’d love to see Robert Icke do Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby, probably lasting a week given his sense of pacing, but bringing his clinical eye, his humanist edge and his interesting understanding of legacy to Dickens would be fascinating. And I’d love to see Joe Hill-Gibbons do No Sex Please We’re British.

Conversely, I’d love to see a workmanlike director like Lindsay Posner do a problematic text like Sarah Kane, or a play which requires directorial innovation like Simon Stephens, and see what happens in a purely functional production of those plays. And I’d love to see a Samuel Beckett revival where the Beckett estate finally go “Fine, do it how you please”.

Looking more recently, I’d also love to see Morton-Smith’s terrific Oppenheimer (how did he not get an Olivier nod?) revived as a chamber piece – Jackson’s production was very good, but there’s a Pinter-esque sparse intensity to the script that a claustrophobic setting would bring out brilliantly – and I’d love to see The James Plays revived as individual plays and not a saga (James II would make a blisteringly intense hour and a half). There are some plays, like almost anything Simon Stephens does, which will end up being frequently revived because of how easily they allow directors to take the fore, but I’m sure there are plenty of current, great plays which will end up being lost due to directors not seeing them as such springboards for something new, and that would be a crying shame.

There’s been a lot of great modern European drama that’s either not played here in twenty years, or hasn’t played here ever. Following that Oppenheimer, I wonder how In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a flawed verbatim play, would manage under a fairly re-interpretative directorial eye. Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (ever been done here?) would still offend audiences now. A few years ago I had a period really obsessed with the writing of Vaclav Havel, and there’s a real timeless profundity about Largo Desolato (and actually, wouldn’t his life make for a great play itself?). In short, I’d like a revival (perhaps a season) of late twentieth century European provocative drama (it’s seasons like that which probably made them choose Emma Rice over me), partly for historical interest, partly to see theatrical history from across the pond, mainly because I think they’d still be provocative, edgy and forward-thinking dramas which would offend, aggravate and anger in the same way Cleansed is, devoid of its Bosnian political framing, many years down the line.

There’s also a great deal of political drama from the 60s that now, I’m sure, doesn’t hold up at all, but I wonder if that would be a terrific reason to revive it – take a boldly anti-Thatcher play and play it not under her leadership but under her legacy, or take a play written about the cold war threat and see how we consider these international relations in a post-Litvinenko world, or take a play written about the bomb and see how we feel with no less of a threat of the bomb, only less talk about it. Last year’s Each His Own Wilderness was a strange one, as it wasn’t a great Lessing play and had dated somewhat, but in bringing it back into the limelight and playing it so straight and so sadly it was a chance to reflect on what good protesting did then, what a legacy that period set and what a world we live in now. I was quite a fan of that show and want more like it.  Robert Bolt's The Tiger and its Tail is an interesting play covering the same period (actually, A Man for All Seasons deserves a revival too) and I'd love to see that done somewhere like the Orange Tree again. It would almost be to those play’s benefit, not their detriment, that they’re so stuck in their time.

It’s funny, actually – we bang on about how much we want new plays, how good it is that new plays are overtaking revivals, how sad it is to be stuck in the past with plays, when actually there are plenty of great plays that need to be revived, that would push theatre forwards by looking backwards. I think we just have the wrong approach to revivals – either money-making fillers (poor Aykbourn, an interesting, progressive writer damned to be seen as filler fluff) or a play we know quite well, so critics can compare it to the twenty-five revivals of the last however long. Let’s have more Les Blancs or the like, and fewer bloody Shakespeares.

P.S. Lynette, there was a beautiful version of Translations touring a few years ago.  It's a real shame you missed it, it was one of my hits of the year - perhaps touring companies have the capacity to be that bit riskier in choices when they only have to sell out for days rather than four months.