Art is from the outset naturally not for the p e o p l e , ” w r o t e Arnold Schoenberg, the godfather of atonal music, “but one wants to force it to be.”

The big story in Alex Ross’s thrilling history of 20th-century music, The Rest Is Noise, is the conflict between modernism and populism, between music for its own sake and music “for use”. It reached its bizarre climax in postwar America, where classical musicians found themselves on the front lines of the cold war. Populists carried the stench of communism, while modernists of the Schoenberg school gave up on the people altogether. Uncompromising atonality was a sign of unyielding political purity. The great tune-smith Aaron Copland delivered a Fanfare for the Common Man, but concern for the common man set all the alarm bells ringing. The CIA secretly funnelled thousands of dollars into the musical avant-garde, and presumably nodded in approval when the American composer Milton Babbitt published in 1958 an essay, Who Cares If You Listen? Babbitt dreamt of a world where “the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism”.

I have tried in vain to think of a British theatrical equivalent of Milton Babbitt. There has always been a combative school of British theatre practitioners who are happy to empty the house, but I don’t think I’ve come across anyone who genuinely doesn’t care what the house thinks. Our theatre has always been “for use”. This wouldn’t surprise Alex Ross, who gratifyingly declares that the British have “a musical culture that has long been the envy of the world”. The politics of modern music have been more forgiving here than in continental Europe or America to the assimilation of new work into the mainstream. We have “no background noise of ideological disputation”.

Ideological background noise was once one of our theatre’s specialities, and I sometimes regret we are no longer at each other’s throats as we were during the furious theatrical battles of the 1950s and 1960s. But maybe the biggest change in the British theatre since the foundation of the National in 1963 has been, if not the assimilation of the fringe into the mainstream, then at least the blurring of the line between the two. It’s a mark of the health of our theatre that artists and audiences now travel happily between the two, and that the discoveries of the new wave are hungrily coopted on behalf of the wider audience. The fraternal dialogue between fringe and mainstream means an artist like Emma Rice can base her company, Kneehigh Theatre, in Cornwall, work at both Battersea Arts Centre and the NT, and collaborate cheerfully with an enterprising commercial producer to draw the crowds to the West End. And if you go to Edinburgh now, you can’t really tell whether the Fringe or the official Festival represents the establishment.

What hasn’t changed is the passionate attachment all true theatre practitioners feel to the subject matter they explore and the wide range of forms they use. If the ideological fury that once stalked the theatrical battleground is missing, what has replaced it is the vitality of the carnival. London’s South Bank is only a microcosm of an explosion of rival voices throughout the country.

The National thrives on contradictory visions of the world and incompatible ways of making theatre. Theatrical dispute is built into our fabric: our three entirely different theatres demand a constant competition for attention, and during the summer our terraces are home to a fiesta of street theatre from all corners of the world.

The heart of our repertoire, and of the British repertoire as a whole, is the classical literary mainstream. Our core purpose is constantly to revitalise it, and to develop actors and directors whose response to the great texts of the past is lucid, imaginative and profound. But their work can only be enhanced by the provocation of a kind of theatre that challenges the traditional literary forms and experiments with new ways of communication. Akram Khan and Lloyd Newson are both artists who have emerged from the dance world with a determination to remove the boundaries between the verbal and the physical. They share the NT’s repertoire this autumn with the archetypal classic: Sophocles’ Oedipus, with a cast that includes actors (Ralph Fiennes, Clare Higgins, Alan Howard) whose expertise in the great tradition is second to none.

Some are trumpeting the death of text. There have been worries of a conspiracy abroad to release the theatre from the dead hand of the playwright, and to turn it over to illiterate armies of puppeteers, video artists, mime and circus performers. War Horse could be seen as evidence of this antitext insurgency. At its centre is a puppet of such expressive power and emotional weight, you’re tempted to think puppetry is a term inadequate to describe whatever it is that’s going on. The show’s communicative burden is carried less by its text than you might expect in the large Olivier Theatre, but it shares that stage with Sophocles. One of its directors, Marianne Elliott, was last in the Olivier with Shaw’s Saint Joan and returns next year with Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. The point is that she, and the National, are fired up by all of them.

Elliott also directed Simon Stephens’s enigmatic, bleak and beautiful play Harper Regan. I worry sometimes the sheer size of the National’s two larger theatres (Olivier and Lyttelton) predisposes us to favour the loud and the energetic, and it’s probably true raucousness is in the British theatre’s DNA. You can start to see why this is at our neighbour the Globe, which has been enjoying a terrific season despite the scandalously bad weather. Shakespeare and his contemporaries needed high-definition acting and writing to hold the crowd, and the prevailing style has, over four centuries, been cut from the same cloth.

So we reserve special attention for the kind of play, like Harper Regan, that prefers to travel obliquely and, for the most part, without noise. We take care to make space for playwrights to journey quietly into our interior, as our theatre is more typically public and social in its concerns. I recently had a fascinating conversation with an admiring French theatre enthusiast, who lamented what he saw as the French theatre’s almost exclusive obsession with the playwright’s interior world and envied our theatre’s vigorous exploration of the world around us. Political engagement is second nature to us.

This is not to say that we have a political line to peddle. There was once a fashion for didactic theatre. It passed, because it was lifeless. There are occasional rumblings about the theatrical stranglehold of the politically correct left. In the face of an explosion of creativi-ty from writers, musicians and artists of every conceivable background and persuasion, it is eccentrically claimed that there are some topics too hot to handle. Quite apart from the fact that there are several shows on their way to the National that vigorously explore what we are told is the biggest taboo of all (the danger of radical Islamism, about which you may not have noticed there’s supposed to be a conspiracy of silence), there is a basic misunderstanding here of the way the theatre works. We’re not trying to tell you how to think. We thrive on conflict and ambiguity. Nothing really comes alive on stage unless its opposite is embodied with equal energy. We’re inviting you to ask yourselves how you feel and how you think. Every now and then there’s theatrical life to be found in a rage-fuelled polemic, but generally we aren’t interested in giving you the answers.

But we are passionately interested in involving you in an image of the world. We plunge into the past, via plays from the past or new plays about the past (like Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin, or Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters). We’re constantly on the lookout for writers who can shed fresh light on our present. I’m working with Richard Bean on his big new play about the periodic waves of immigrants who have made their homes in the East End. It is in the great tradition of boisterous public plays that pulled the crowds to the South Bank when the theatres first arrived here. It asks questions about what it means to be British, and its politics are totally unclassifiable. It couldn’t be further in spirit from “Who cares if you listen?”

A play that asks what it means to be British should be of universal interest, and the great Olivier amphitheatre is ideally suited to For details of The Sunday Times Sundays at the National Theatre, and other great offers, see page 20 shows that bind the entire community in an act of self-examination. But universal interest and, in particular, universal approbation, are overrated virtues. Wide-ranging subject matter and experiments in form inevitably have the potential to enrage and confuse as much as they stimulate and delight. It would be a poor theatre that pleased everyone all of the time, and it’s time to free ourselves from the obsession with the perfectly formed, beautifully diverse audience. There is no such thing.

The wide-ranging carnival of British performing arts pulls in any number of different kinds of crowds. It would be terrific if every child emerged from school fully equipped to enjoy a Prom, and no effort should be spared to open up the glories of classical music to those who haven’t encountered it at school. But meanwhile the 5,000 who typically pack the Albert Hall on an August evening have only their musical enthusiasm in common. They don’t look like each other and they don’t look like the crowds who recently packed the Arcola Theatre and the Royal Court for two tremendous plays, by Femi Oguns and Bola Agbaje, about the tensions between British West Indians and British Nigerians. But so what? Audiences are heat-seeking missiles. They go to what grabs them. It’s the variety of what’s out there that counts.

As it happens, I know I wasn’t the only one who was at both the Arcola and the Albert Hall this summer. We may be experiencing an unprecedented profusion of performing arts from ever-growing and ever more various communities of creators. Theatres have embraced the need and the responsibility to respond to this profusion and to get out there and find audiences for the kind of stuff that not so long ago would have caused bewilderment among a much more homogenous crowd. It’s a carnival that embraces everyone who has something worthwhile to say and everyone who wants to hear it. It’s the CIA of the cold-war era’s nightmare and a world away from poor old Milton Babbitt sitting in his room composing “problematical activities” to the sound of no hands clapping.

National treasure trove

- From today, for the first time in its history, the National Theatre will have Sunday performances, which will be sponsored by this newspaper. An adventurous highlight of The Sunday Times Sundays will be in-i, which brings together the dancer/choreographer Akram Khan and the actress Juliette Binoche.

- The Royal National Theatre acquired a royal prefix in 1988, but has not always had royal approval. Prince Charles has described Denys Lasdun’s design as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting”.

- It has intriguing gaps in performing Shakespeare. The National has never, for example, staged The Comedy of Errors and All’s Well That Ends Well.

- Plays that started out on the South Bank and ended up on the big screen include Betrayal; Plenty; Closer; The History Boys; The Madness of George III (changed to The Madness of King George so nobody mistook it for a threequel); and Amadeus, which won eight Oscars in 1985. In 32 years on the South Bank, it has never had an artistic director who did not go to Cambridge. After Olivier came Peter Hall (St Catharine’s), Richard Eyre (Peterhouse), Trevor Nunn (Downing) and Nicholas Hytner (Trinity Hall).

- The NT has done many more English, Scottish and Irish plays than Welsh. Peter Gill has had five of his plays mounted there. And Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood was staged in 1995.

- Some other countries have national theatres, but they are by no means universal. The oldest opened in Washington DC in 1835, but today it’s a receiving house for touring productions. The only other G8 country with a producing NT is Japan. The newest national theatre is the spaceship-like National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. The National Theatre of Scotland has no home at all, though it has been a runaway success. The one with more stages than ours is Norway’s, with four, while Korea’s hosts four different national companies.

Jasper Rees

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