mere fact, mere fiction

written by David Hare

This month I celebrated a melancholy anniversary. It was 40 years since the premiere of my first full-length play at the Hampstead Theatre Club on 6 April 1970. Those old enough to remember will know that the prefabricated building was moved first from one side of the Swiss Cottage car park to the other – and then back again. Somewhere in transit the word "Club" dropped from the shingle. In other words, in four decades, theatre culture has changed, if not out of all recognition, at least significantly.

One further example. If you set to writing plays in the postwar years, it was necessary, or at least expected, to pass through a portal of approval. In prospect, this gave a comfortable, orderly feeling to the idea of being a British dramatist. Kenneth Tynan, a humanist dandy, guarded the portal on one side from his position at the Observer. Harold Hobson, a Conservative Francophile whose life had been changed at the age of 10 by the sight of a Bible in the illuminated window of a Christian Science church, guarded the other side from the Sunday Times. A novice playwright had every reason to expect that a life in the theatre would involve attracting and then retaining the interest of at least one of these two men. Hobson's name was inextricably linked with Beckett's and with Pinter's. Tynan's fortunes rose with his advocacy of the work of Osborne. These were the writers they championed and whose view of the world fired them up. They were interlinked by a profound correspondence of belief. Today, no such correspondence exists. No living theatrical figure is associated with any particular critic. Tynan, just turned 83 years old had he not been taken by emphysema, would be devastated to know that to work seriously in the British theatre it is no longer necessary even to know the name of the Observer's theatre critic.

Some people have understandable nostalgia for what then felt like a common culture, even if, over the years, bitter experience left few practitioners with much trust in those delegated to be its guardians. In fact, the growth of diversity both in the audience and in the places it sharpens its opinions has brought only benefit to any dramatist whose first love is experiment and innovation. And newspapers that once enjoyed such power are themselves discovering what it is like to live with the threat of working in a minority form.

Throughout the 1980s, propaganda for the free market aimed to reach out into many spheres beyond the economic. The aims of the revolution were cultural as much as political. Norman Tebbit was recently asked why the Thatcherism in which he had played such an important part had created a society he so heartily disliked. Tebbit replied that Conservative governments of his generation had taken on such a massive task in fixing the economy that they had had no time to fix the culture. He was being too modest. In those days, in my memory, there was certainly no shortage of fellow-travellers happy to direct their fire against the most communal of art forms. For years no Murdoch paper let a week go by without some loyal employee railing against their own definition of elitism – elitism often being represented by the state-subsidised British theatre.

Today, such attitudes themselves look dated. Having so long prophesied The Death of the Theatre, the prophets have woken to find themselves writhing in the coils of a problem rather closer to home: The Death of the Newspaper. What a reversal of fortune! If the free market is indeed the moral courtroom that its admirers claim, then what a judgment is being visited on Fleet Street. What a pack of failures the editors must be! No artistic director of a theatre could survive such a plummeting loss of income and popularity without being sacked by their board. Surely it must be, according to those iron laws of the market which newspapers have done so much to propagate, that consumers are today buying fewer newspapers because those newspapers are poor products. The people writing for them must be no good at writing.

To read more, see the original article, or learn more please click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/apr/17/david-hare-theatre-fact-fiction