There are several reasons I haven't done much on, or with, this blog but every now and then something comes up which I really want to keep on record, if only for myself. This time it's the National celebrating its 50th birthday. Half a century of sopping up funding for the capital with very little changed from those Yes Minister days when the joke was that the director of the National would be apoplectic if required by the government to earn that name by actually taking their productions around the country... This point was made by the i newspaper's Arts Editor's today, under the pithy heading A great landmark for The National Theatre, but just how 'national' are they?
"As the National Theatre celebrates with a televised gala, I still wonder how truly national our publicly-funded national companies are.
"As the National Theatre celebrates with a televised gala, I still wonder how truly national our publicly-funded national companies are.
The National Theatre actually does do some touring. But the English National Opera does literally none – yet taxpayers across the country are paying for it. With the Royal Opera the answer is the same, zero touring. The Royal Ballet does tour – to Japan, Australia and America. Perish the thought it should ever venture into Manchester or Bristol or Newcastle or anywhere in Britain.
It’s not good enough and at a moment when we are celebrating one national arts company, the Government ought to take a closer look at how national our so-called national companies are. We all pay for them, we should all reap the benefits."
The National evidently enjoyed a good jolly ~ or a 'splendid evening' as Paul Taylor also writing in the i reports: a marvel of gracefulness, pace and profound yet humorous and lightly-worn pride in a half century of extraordinary achievement. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the evening was also a logistical triumph, a seamless flow of rare archive footage, succinct contextualising comment and excerpts from thirty-odd of the theatre’s greatest hits... a stirring interplay between the past and the present-tense of the show.
It all sounds marvellous, darlings ~ you can read the details here ~ until the point at which Mr Taylor notes, mid-eulogy on this celebration of the astonishing variety of new work the National has produced from Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) to London Road (2011) that
"It was embarrassing that Alecky Blythe, who did the book for London Road, was the only female writer represented. I think that I would have traded one of the three extracts from David Hare for a gobbet, say, of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin."
A good point, and shameful that neither Nicholas Hytner nor any of his associates, assistants, or consultants, made it at the planning stage. I didn't even enjoy London Road, but I'm very pleased there was at least one woman in the corner of this celebration of everything the National has done for the theatre in the last half century...
"Here’s to the next 50 years," the report concludes. Here's to quite a few changes, even if that means demolishing the entire notion of National theatre as a building or an organisation, and replacing it with lively, challenging, locally-based drama groups who don't mind actually touring.
