Sometimes Celebrity Gets the Job Done
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more from LoveLife:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/aug/11/star-actors-s...
"Why do we go to theatre? For lots of reasons; but one of them is obviously to see star actors in great plays. Which explains the figures recently released by the Society of London Theatre, showing that attendances at straight plays in the first half of 2009 are up by 19% on the previous year. No big surprise there when you look at what's been on offer: Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, Jude Law in Hamlet, Ken Stott in A View from the Bridge, Helen Mirren in Phèdre. To that we can now add Rachel Weisz in A Streetcar Named Desire, which is causing a box office stampede at the Donmar.But what can we learn from all this? Mark Lawson recently argued that it showed the economic crisis was making managements more conservative and that there was a flight from the new and the risky. Now Mark is a good man with whom I normally agree, but here I beg to differ. First, I don't think there's anything reactionary about audiences craving to see Shakespeare, Racine, Beckett, Miller and Williams. Secondly, in the short time since Mark wrote his piece two new plays have appeared, which shows there is a comparable appetite for living writers. Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, running close to three-and-a-half hours, has been packing out the Royal Court. Meanwhile, Lucy Prebble's Enron has been raising a storm in Chichester, which I guarantee will be repeated when it moves to the Court in September.
But what do Jerusalem and Enron have in common? One, after all, is a lament for the decline of rural England. The other is a sharp analysis of the corporate crisis. What unites the two plays, apart from their epic scale and superlative productions, is that both are built around phenomenal star parts and performances.
Audiences are hungry for new plays that deal with big issues and provide fat lead roles. I am not anti-ensemble, and I always hesitate to tell dramatists what to do. But history proves that the plays that endure are those that provide rich gifts for actors. That's why John Osborne's The Entertainer – coming to Manchester's Royal Exchange this autumn – is never out of the repertory. Or why Pinter's plays, with Jonathan Pryce doing The Caretaker in Liverpool in October, are ceaselessly revived. Or why Peter Shaffer's Amadeus will never die."
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