Going Too Far?

Michael Billington wonders if the directors are more interested in gimmicks than the plays’ texts.

- Jane Watkins

Recently, Sir David Hare raised a theatrical storm, bitterly attacking the cult of concept-driven directors whose cavalier treatment of classic texts is ‘beginning to infect British theatre’. Instantly, this produced a set of polarised reactions. On the one hand, a lot of people, many of them young, praised the rise of creative directors; others sighed wistfully for an age in which actors and writers called the shots.

Personally, I think the whole issue needs a more nuanced response. I have some sympathy with Sir David’s argument. I have also noticed how many young British directors seek to imitate their continental counterparts by treating texts as a springboard for their own fevered imagination. At the same time, the British theatre in my lifetime has benefited hugely from the vision of pioneering directors such as Joan littlewood, Peter Brook and tyrone Guthrie. Between them, they changed our notion of what a play could be, revitalised classic texts and even reconfigured our stages: the crucible in Sheffield and the chichester Festival theatre both owe a big debt to Guthrie’s tireless campaign against the proscenium arch.

Where does that leave us today? My own view is that you have to view each production on its merits rather than taking a hard dogmatic line. take the work of the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, who is a god to some and a devil to others. I know that his production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler—running at the national until March 21—has almost given some people a seizure, yet I thought his modern-dress production, with Ruth Wilson’s Hedda roaming the stage clad in what I dubbed a Freudian slip, caught perfectly the heroine’s demonism, despair and helpless entrapment in a loveless marriage.