Issue 10 | March 2006

Not of an age but for all time. That was fellow playwright Ben Jonsons verdict on William Shakespeares work after his death but Jonson could not have known just how accurate his prediction would prove to be.

There were certainly playwrights before Shakespeare and, even in his day, he was just one of a number of competing voices. Yet he is the one who has lasted and whose fame has spread throughout the world. Today, nearly 400 years after his death, it is impossible to speak about UK theatre without putting Shakespeare at its heart, and his 37 plays are still performed constantly both at home and abroad. The tales of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Macbeth are familiar even to those who have never seen the plays performed in a theatre.

These are quintessentially British plays and, for many people, Shakespeare is at the heart of UK culture. Indeed, he was recently voted the fifth greatest Briton of all time. But the plays themselves are hardly insular examinations of any one country or people. Drawing on stories from many lands and often set in exotic locations, they have a universal quality that has kept them alive. And where Shakespeare triumphs over his contemporaries is in the fact that his work can be interpreted in an almost unlimited number of ways, allowing them to be reinvented for each new generation.

Vicious wit While Shakespeare may still be the leading player in the story of UK theatre, there are many other significant dramatists. By the late 19th century, drama was truly a popular and established art form, and one of the most successful playwrights was Oscar Wilde. Following a period when his controversial private life led to a fall from grace, his work is today regularly revived in UK theatres.

Wildes sparkling dialogue and vicious wit were highly acclaimed, as were the ridiculous situations described in popular plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband. But while they still make audiences laugh today, they also had a serious purpose at the time, as Wilde used his light touch to deliver trenchant criticisms of the hypocrisies of respectable Victorian society.

By the late 19th century, drama was truly a popular and established art form, and one of the most successful playwrights was Oscar Wilde

Diversity Although his work debuted in London,Wilde was in fact Irish, showing again the diversity of UK theatre, which draws influences from many places. Another of the leading lights of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also from Ireland, and shared Wildes social concerns, albeit with a more overt agenda. George Bernard Shaw was one of the leading thinkers and campaigners of his time. He used his plays to explore challenging ideas, many of which are still hotly debated even now. For instance, in Major Barbara he asked whether it could be right to use armaments in the pursuit of a good cause. In Pygmalion, he tackled the British class system; many people will know the story from the popular musical adaptation of the story, My Fair Lady. For his work, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Eighty years on in 2005 Harold Pinter, another titan of the UK stage, also received the prestigious award. The Londonborn writer has been at the forefront of the modern theatre in the UK since his debut in 1957 with The Birthday Party. The play, with its two sinister, mysterious figures who arrive to shake up the life of a young man, established Pinters style, which reveals the dark truths that can lurk behind banal conversation. The adjective Pinteresque was coined to describe his writing, in particular the use of significant pauses to reveal what the characters are not saying.

Sir Harold Pinter
Goffredo / Rex Features

Revolutionary language Pinter, too, became a campaigner and his later work has been explicitly political. His 1988 play Mountain Language, for instance, is set in an unnamed country, in a prison for dissidents where language has become a tool for those in power to oppress minorities. Pinters own use of language is revolutionary: fellow playwright Sir David Hare said that Pinter had cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly.

Hare himself has been one of the most notable figures of UK theatre in recent decades. From the 1970s onwards, his plays for the National Theatre have examined contemporary society and its institutions, from the Church of England (in Racing Demon) to the Labour Party (Absence of War) and the legal system (Murmuring Judges). But his most famous work, Plenty, from 1978 (later a film written by Hare and starring Meryl Streep) centred on a woman disillusioned by her life in post-war Britain after the drama of her past involvement with the French Resistance.

In contrast, the UK's most successful modern playwright, Sir Alan Ayckbourn (who holds the impressive title of the world's most performed playwright after Shakespeare) is known for lighter fare. He is hugely prolific. His 69th play Improbable Fiction premiered in 2005 and each new work is as popular with audiences as the last.

Serious comedy Like Wilde before him, Ayckbourn uses humour to puncture the pretensions of society, particularly the suburban middle class. In his best known plays, Absurd Person Singular, How the Other Half Loves and The Norman Conquests, he sets up farcical situations which spiral out of control to hilarious effect.

Humour is a crucial element in the work of many UK dramatists. Another leading light, Sir Tom Stoppard, has been described as a master of eserious comedy', combining dazzling literary conceits and intellectual wordplay with laugh-out-loud jokes. In his plays, you might find a discussion of quantum physics alongside the sort of silly puns that would delight a child. Interestingly, Stoppard's most famous and groundbreaking play harks back to the works of Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead made Stoppard's name in 1967 and gave theatre audiences not just a classic play in itself, but a whole new way of understanding Hamlet. In the play, Stoppard places two minor figures from Shakespeare's play at the centre of the action, showing them as hapless pawns amid the great dramatic events going on around them.

Mark Ravenhill
Adrian Dennis / Rex Features

Contemporary theatre Of course, a new generation of young playwrights is now exploring contemporary UK society in often controversial new ways. One of the most talked about is Mark Ravenhill, who won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright for his 1998 work Handbag despite it being only this third fulllength piece. His most recent play, Totally Over You, was on the very topical subject of celebrity culture and instant pop stars. Another rising star of modern UK theatre is Patrick Marber who has turned from television comedy fame to writing for the stage. His breakthrough play Closer, about the intimate relationships between two couples, became a smash hit in London and New York, with a film version featuring Jude Law and Julia Roberts. Marber has developed his dark humour even further in his recent work for the National Theatre. Ben Elton also made his name as a leading stand-up comic, and is well-known to UK television audiences for his work on popular alternative comedy shows such as The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Thin Blue Line, but he has now established himself as a writer of feel-good theatre shows such as the Queen musical, We Will Rock You and The Beautiful Game, about football.

Unusually, Kwame Kwei-Armah combines a day job acting in popular television hospital soap Casualty with a serious career as a playwright, examining the lives of black Britons in plays such as Elmina's Kitchen and Fix Up. Kwei-Armah's work, along with Courttia Newland, Mark Norfolk and others, shows that UK theatre is embracing new, multicultural voices. Such writers help to ensure that the stage remains a lively place where all the diverse influences that make up the UK are represented.
Shakespeare would surely have approved