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NT 2000: the Need to Make Meaning

THE NATIONAL THEATRE'S best-kept secret of 1999 was NT 2000, a year-long series of 45-minute public platforms that staged extracts from the 'hundred most significant plays of the century', along with discussions involving writers, directors, and actors, many from original productions. Although the plays were selected by quite a small number of theatre practitioners about 850 were asked to nominate ten plays each the producer Angus MacKechnie says that it was an essentially 'democratic' process. When all the results were analysed, 188 writers had been nominated for 377 plays. Overall, Miller garnered the most votes, followed closely by Pinter and Beckett. The top five plays were Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Look Back in Anger, and Long Day's journey into Night. MacKechnie's methodology does raise many questions: although he wanted 'significant' rather than 'best' plays, his criteria also encouraged people to include 'plays that you have enjoyed'. Thus postmodern relativism jostled with 'great, influential, or important' work, and objections abounded. Just how significant are Ena Lamont Stewart's Men Should Weep (1947) or August Wilson's Fences (1985) in a list that has excluded Jones and Pinero, Lonsdale and Greene, Whiting and Simpson, Mercer and Rudkin, Murphy and Wood, Marcus and Halliwell, Matura and Pinnock? The Mousetrap is certainly significant, but is it great or influential? How many people actually voted for Dry Rot or Run for Your Wife? Even more problematic were the 1990s: no mention of Sarah Kane's Blasted, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, or Trainspotting. Like all such surveys, NT 2000 is a snapshot of reputation rather than quality. The decision to represent each playwright with only one play was also problematic. Pinter is thus represented by The Caretaker rather than The Birthday Party, Orton by Loot rather than What the Butler Saw, Hare by Racing Demon rather than Plenty. Limiting the list to English drama worldwide resulted in 79 entries coming from Great Britain and Ireland (nine Irish, four Scottish, one Welsh), twenty from North America, one from South Africa but none from Australia or New Zealand. Only fourteen writers were women and three black, but this reflects the social history of production rather than today's prejudice. However, because many of those voting were connected with the National, the list was swelled by its own past productions: how else could Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (National, 1990) be one of the hundred great plays of the century? Alan Bennett is an important writer, but is The Madness of George III (National, 1991) his most significant work? Would Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928) have made the list if not for the recent National revival? Is Tony Kushner's Angels in America (National, 1993) really the ninth most significant play of the century? By excluding plays in translation (no Chekhov, Brecht, or Pirandello), NT 2000 says less about theatre history than about a mythical English heritage. But limiting selections to an Englishlanguage tradition did have the advantage of a tighter focus. It allowed some rarely performed plays Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime (1930), Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Heathcote Williams's AC/DC (1970) to creep in. But it also meant that the platforms captured the self-referential quality of theatre. Noel Coward's Private Lives (1930), for example, was echoed by Patrick Marber's Closer (1997), with Educating Rita referring back to Pygmalion, and Observe the Sons of Ulster to Oh What a Lovely War! So while the list did fairly represent the grand sweep of English-language theatre, dominated by the great mid-century American tragedies along with Pinter and Beckett, it also tended to be more reflective of the Irish contribution (from J. M. Synge to Conor McPherson) than to the Scots (from J. M. Barrie to C. P. Taylor), and despite examples from the Manchester School valued the metropolis over the regions. Few would quarrel with the most popular selections; but even fewer would agree with the more idiosyncratic choices. But whatever doubts arose about the list, the platforms themselves were often revelatory. Hampered by the fact that authors, directors, and cast members had already died, those platforms covering the earlier part of the century were more academic than the later ones. Even so, the blessing of longevity allowed the 86-year-old politician Barbara Castle to be present on the platform for Galsworthy's Strife (1909), a play in which she had acted during the 1920s. The importance of NT 2000 apart from its frank celebration of theatre lay in its emphasis on public discussion as a means of widening the audience for a play and clarifying its meaning. This was particularly apt for two platforms where