It was the National Theatre’s inestimable artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, who quite rightly advised theater critics several years ago to get out more, by which he meant, Go to the opera and ballet, see films and listen to music, since all these activities inform our weekly immersion in the theater. How right he is. But there’s another imperative, less frequently heeded, that, I think, makes a difference, as well: taking a chance on the new generation of practitioners who with luck will become the subjects of professional critical scrutiny and analysis over time. By that, I don’t mean forays into amateur dramatics (or, as the British call it, AmDram) — though I have had fun cheering on my great friend Helena in numerous endeavours, from Noel Coward to Shakespeare to panto, courtesy her enterprising local theatre troupe in the Hampshire town of West Meon. (We’ll pass politely over the version of The Elephant Man that I was once dragged to somewhere in the wilds of north London, in which a work colleague at the time was playing the title role.)
But it was with a view towards seeing tomorrow’s exciting theatrical prospects today that I seized the opportunity the other week to spend four days as one of that same number of adjudicators (three American, one British, London impresario and Durham Univ. graduate Giles Ramsay) at the 34th Durham Drama Festival in the ceaselessly stunning northern English cathedral town. Well, that and the prospect to relive however briefly my own university days, since Yale itself utilises the very system of residential colleges found at Durham and, well before that, at Oxford and Cambridge, the scholastic elder statesmen that pioneered this particular collegiate model. (more…)
