It gets no index entry of its own, but rarely can Leamington Spa have been mentioned so frequently in a history of British theatre. What Michael Billington brings to that well-trodden subject is chiefly himself. Born in 1939 in that provincial town, then quiet but within reach not only of Stratford-upon-Avon but a good education at Warwick and Oxford, he grew up believing in the possibility of personal and collective progress – a gently leftish perspective. Briefly a publicist in Lincoln and a reporter for the Liverpool Post and Echo, Billington has been writing about theatre since 1965, first on The Times and then, for the past thirty-six years, as principal theatre critic of the Guardian. This rich base, of experience rather than simple study, from which to tackle theatre history is coupled with a belief that theatre and politics have a close and truth-telling relationship. Chapters of State of the Nation are devoted not to theatrical trends as such but to governments and prime ministers. The story is broken up not by sensational first nights but by general elections, beginning with the Labour landslide of 1945 so unexpected by the constituency of, for example, Noël Coward.

Billington’s first hero is J. B. Priestley. He admires Priestley’s ambitious vision for the future of theatre as well as a range of plays that includes An Inspector Calls (particularly in its last, Expressionist reincarnation at the National Theatre in 1993). Billington is not the first to assert that both the Attlee government and the British theatre before the “revolution” of 1956 were much less under-achieving and dull than they have been painted. He finds a tolerant communitarianism very like his own in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables; claims a gentle subversiveness for T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, in which a young literary socialite opts for a horrible martyrdom in Africa; and points out the direct engagement with a war-shattered society made possible by Christopher Fry’s choice of medieval setting and poetic language for a story of love and faith redeeming a disillusioned soldier.

Billington is particularly sensible about Look Back in Anger, acknowledging the arrival of a thrilling new voice on the British stage in 1956 but refusing to join in the game of pitting its opening against that of Waiting for Godot (1955 in London) or the work of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. Instead, he reminds us that Hungary, Suez and “Rock Around the Clock” were also indicators of mid-1950s social change, and identifies John Whiting’s Saint’s Day (first seen in 1951) as the play that shifted the “tectonic plates” of British theatre. Inspired by Whiting’s own wartime experience, Saint’s Day is set in a placid English village where three artists are gathered in isolation from reality. Three soldiers, escapees from a detention centre, arrive and wreak havoc, but perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the destruction that follows is the way a smooth metropolitan belletrist happily joins in. Saint’s Day was savaged by the critics, and Whiting’s sanity called into question. He is regularly cited as the artist who disproves the comforting assertion that real talent will out. He died relatively young, still unregarded, and the “three impressive revivals” seen by Michael Billington haven’t materially affected his reputation.

There is a methodological gap in the book here. How do we know that relatively unpopular writers like Whiting (and later David Rudkin, John Arden and Edward Bond) are “important”, while proven theatre-fillers are not? One of Billington’s main objections to cultural Thatcherism is that it made “bums on seats” the decisive criterion of theatrical worth, but we need to know whether there is more than the “because we say so” of aggrieved artists and critics behind his dissent. What other criteria for judging importance are there?

It is hard to know, and therefore hard to deal with the almost complete omission from State of the Nation of a whole strand of popular theatre which, from well before the 1979 election, entertained large numbers of people while expressing anger at the fate of industry and, particularly, the unemployed. There is something ironic in complaining about what Thatcherism did to the working class and then writing out of history the artists who tackled the subject head-on. The real angry brigade of Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell (whose Blood Brothers is still running in the West End after twenty-four years) and John Godber have dealt with poverty, poor education, mental and physical ill-health, social fragmentation and the crisis of identity experienced by all who were led to define themselves through their work. These playwrights have even brought some of those people into the theatres.

Also ignored is the (in my view) greatest post-war play in English, which was first seen in England in 1949 but has spoken powerfully to just about every post-industrial city in the world over the past three decades: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. When Linda Loman defiantly demands that “Attention must be paid” to poor flawed Willy, not in spite of the fact that he is a failure but because his humanity demands it, she sums up a trend in drama that is at least as old as Ibsen: the playwright’s urge to show the way the state of the nation, and the world, looks through a particular pair of eyes.

Perhaps talk of Thatcherism now seems a bit old-fashioned and embarrassing, but a serious-minded historical survey should at least acknowledge the variety of theatrical responses to an era’s defining ideology. And yet it seems that, despite his professed interest in theatre away from the metropolis, Billington has too often simply missed out on those writers who have their big Press Nights (and big audiences) in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Birmingham and Hull. That Michael Billington has left Leamington Spa far behind and joined what he calls “the metropolitan opinion-formers” is neither a surprise nor in itself a criticism, but it is undeniably a limitation.

State of the Nation is as clearly written as you would expect from such an accomplished reviewer (it cheerfully resurrects puns used in notices thirty years ago); one of its most likeable features is the author’s readiness to own up to mistakes – over (for example) Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Sarah Kane’s Blasted. It doesn’t pretend to be encyclopedic. Which, of course, leaves more to be written.

Michael Billington
STATE OF THE NATION
British Theatre since 1945
435pp. Faber and Faber. £25.
978 0 571 21034 3

Paul Allen has presented Night Waves on BBC Radio 3 since 1998. He is a former chairman of the Arts Council Drama Panel and of Sheffield Theatres. His adaptation of Brassed Off opened in Sheffield and transferred to the National Theatre in 1998 and has since been produced around the world.

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