10 Years of Cultural Capital

Earlier this month, Cultural Capital was ten years old and it has been a varied and interesting period in which to write about developments in theatre and its rapidly changing external context. When the site was established in 2013, London was coming down from the wave of excitement around the Olympics the year before and there was a general optimism about what that might mean for more forward-looking notions of inclusion, representation and twenty-first century British identity. A decade on and Cultural Capital has been shaped by unexpected forces, of political instability in the aftermath of Britain’s exit from the European Union, the repositioning of female-centered narratives following high-profile sexual assault cases, the immediate and long-term impact of the pandemic and the influence of new voices and perspectives that are shifting not only what we hear but how those messages are communicated and who by. These themes have fundamentally shaped theatre locally, regionally and nationally since Cultural Capital began, and this tenth anniversary post is an opportunity to reflect on what some of that means for theatremakers today and in the future.

Cultural Capital for most of its life has been devoted to long-form criticism, examining a single production in detail each week, thinking about how plays are structured and performed, balancing an understanding of writing, directing, staging and acting to consider the relationships between creative decision-making and audience experience. But a key purpose has always been to put those decisions and experiences into a broader context, considering where a play or musical fits into the theatre landscape, how it reflects or advocates industry themes or trends as well as potential alignments with the signature style or characteristics of the writer, director or performer.

With one essay per week, over 500 shows have come and gone, many little more than a memory for those who saw it, but what remains is the collective meaning of those experiences and their influence on the work being produced now and in the months and years to come. To reflect on all of this, below are a selection of shows, one from every year that Cultural Capital has existed between 2013 and 2023, that outline some of the main creative and thematic influences on theatremaking today. These are not necessarily the best or favourite shows – always an arbitrary choice – but productions or seasons of work reviewed on this site that have been cultural mileposts or markers that tell the story of theatre content now.

2013 – Coriolanus

Josie Rourke’s production of Coriolanus for the Donmar Warehouse in 2013 is one of the great Shakespearean revivals of the twenty-first century, filmed by National Theatre Live and broadcast freely during the pandemic. Rourke’s powerful interpretation of Shakespeare’s play initiated introspective new work exploring male violence, expectations of contemporary and inherited notions of masculinity, and the spaces in which men can be vulnerable. Rourke’s approach presented the character of Coriolanus as an archetypal hero-warrior, a man who forges reputation through physical conflict and uses it to transition to political office while failing to account for the vagaries of public opinion and populism that certainly speak to our own era. The souring of this relationships anticipated many of the discussions around male toxicity and aggressive patriarchal power structures that have infused cultural debates and responses ever since.

But the most valuable contribution this play made was in the moments between Shakespeare’s words where Rourke and Hiddleston found the private man and the physical vulnerability that he hides from the world, even from his own family. In the most famous scene Coriolanus showers to remove the blood from his battered body, wincing as the water hits his wounds, showing the humanity and pain beneath the masculine frontage but only to the audience. Beautifully captured in a photography by Johan Persson and explained in The Art of Theatre Photography, these private moments of doubt and frailty explore concepts of performative masculinity and its effect which theatre has grappled with ever since, asking questions about what it means to be a man in a public sense in moments of conflict and in the period between, as well as the cost of upholding those inherited traits. Many writers gone on to developed important new work in this area from Clint Dyer and Roy Williams to James Graham, Kyo Choi and Lynne Nottage, but Rourke’s production created that larger platform for debates about contemporary masculine behaviours to thrive.

2014 – A View From the Bridge

Male behaviour is also essential to the Young Vic’s defining production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, another of the greatest and most memorable productions of the century. But its place in this list relies on the presence of its auteur director Ivo van Hove who along with several other creatives appearing later in this piece, herald the rise of a new generation of star directors, artists whose work is immediately recognisable, distinctive and often radical in its presentation of classic works. van Hove’s resonant approach stripped away the physical clutter and realism with which Miller’s plays had often been presented and instead focused on the intensity and inevitability of the unfolding tragedy. Played without an interval and staged only on a slim rectangular set, the cumulative raw power of this production was hugely impactful, a deep and in many ways revelatory excavation of text and character that has defined the director’s work ever since.

The significance of A View From the Bridge, which transferred to the West End a year later, is the relative simplicity in the staging and text-focused approach that has begun to realign interpretations of major work in the years following this production. And while the heavily decorated realist production has by no means disappeared, there is now a real artistic and commercial strength in the approach adopted by van Hove and those who followed. Far from detaching the play from its context, van Hove found strength and freedom, arguably a greater universality, in the characters as well as a forceful muscularity in Miller’s writing that is both exposing for performers but also richly challenging. An important marker on the road to 2023, van Hove and the star directors emerging in his wake continue to shape fresh, text-centred wok with a strong contemporary purpose.

2015 – The Nether

One of theatre’s most important roles is to engage with and represent challenging or uncomfortable stories, particularly when they advance vital conversations about how we live and the ethical and moral implications of those choices. Jennifer Haley’s play The Nether in 2015 is arguably one of the most difficult debates undertaken onstage in the last decade, asking whether creating virtual worlds for pedophiles to act out their fantasies would ultimately prevent characters from doing so in real life. The Nether thus has a two-fold contribution to make to current themes and the positioning of stage content; the first is the growing body of work reflecting on the Internet and online discussions in shaping social behaviour of which many shows from Dear Evan Hansen to Public Domain have since added to our understanding of living with the Internet and its implications for individuals caught in its glare. The dominant place that online engagement has increasingly played in our lives has led to a controversial blurring of boundaries between real and unreal experiences, as well as the conditioning facilitated by anonymous online freedoms, all of which emerged from Hayley’s multilayed assessment of the extremes of Internet platforms.

But The Nether’s second contribution is even more valuable, in reigniting discussions about what should and can be presented on stage, and considering the role of censorship in what theatre audiences are permitted to view. Some of these concerns have been raised just this year with the adaptation of A Little Life (discussed later) eliciting negative responses from some reviewers for its repositioning of those boundaries. But should any topic, even Hayleys’s wide-ranging consideration of remedial support for those with criminal tendencies, be off-limits? Theatre should and does have a vital role to play in facilitating troubling social reflections in a relatively safe and open space, and while even eight years on there are no clear answers, plays like The Nether are absolutely vital to thinking through the what ifs, and encouraging engagement with the darker side of human behaviour.

2016 – The Deep Blue Sea

2016 was a huge change moment in Britain in which the political and social landscape shifted, one of the outcomes of which has been a greater focus on female-led narratives and improved equity of leading roles. There is still a long way to go but the National Theatre’s adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea directed by Carrie Cracknell arrived at the perfect moment. A sensitive and thoughtful revival, it remains one of the most memorable stagings of the last ten years. Rattigan of course had always written well for women, but this felt like the right production at the right moment, foregrounding Hester’s thoughtful and entirely rational interior landscape and the sacrifices she knowingly made to have a different kind of life than the one she was born and married into. At this particular moment in 2016, Cracknell’s production presented a woman who was making a decision about who she was and wanted to be, prepared to accept it regardless of the consequences, taking control of her own mortality as she worked through those outcomes.

This centrism of women in their own narratives is an important theme in the last eight years even when, like Hester, their lives have been shaped by men, in this case her husband, lover and father. Performed by a luminous Helen McCrory in one of her finest roles, Cracknell’s production had a Hamlet-like quality as Hester contemplates whether to live or die – a notion explored in this essay when the show was screened via NT at Home during the pandemic. The strength and reserve of this performance is one of the most significant of this period, finding a greater, more universal resonance in the domestic experience of one woman that set a standard for a more meaningful engagement with women’s stories in the years to come. New work like Jermyn Street Theatre’s 15 Heroines and Galapagos owe a debt to this production and the varied, multi-faceted heroine that Rattigan originally created.

2017 – Ink

James Graham is unarguably one of the most important playwrights of the last ten years, and while This House from 2012 was his breakout piece, in 2017 he dominated new work with three plays opening in the same year – Ink at the Almeida, Labour of Love at the Noel Coward and Quiz at Chichester Festival Theatre. But it is the former that best symbolises the thematic direction of the writer’s focus in the years since it premiered and by extension a growing body of work reflecting on politics, society and the role of the media in shaping what we think and how we behave. Under new owner Rupert Murdoch, Ink charted the first year of The Sun newspaper’s growing influence and explained the introduction of audience-driven, transformative populist content that rejected older forms of newspaper reporting and replaced it with a fresh tone that – the character’s argue – spoke on the level of its working class readership. Whether the tabloid tapped into and reflecting a pre-existing need for this content or actively created the appetite for it, is one of the Graham’s major themes as protagonist Larry Lamb fails to heed a warning about the unmanageable consequences of the changes his team instigate.

Ink is a notable turning point in Graham’s work, moving from the political subjects with which he is still most associated to the broader anatomy of non-democratic organisations that wield considerable social power, and few writers have so consistently and clearly explained the cause and effect relationships between our power structures and the challenges facing modern Britain. This play also embedded the thematic focus and theatrical styles that have defined the playwright’s work in subsequent years in which Graham has pointed to other major change moments in post-war history that inform how we engage as a society today. But Ink was the first major play to look beyond traditional political subjects and explain how our society works now.

2018 – Summer and Smoke

There have been few developments more satisfying to watch than the rise of Rebecca Frecknall, an exciting star director who, like Ivo van Hove, has shaped theatrical content in this period with a distinctive and illuminating vision. Focused on rethinking classic texts by major dramatists, Frecknall’s breakthrough production was the Almeida’s Summer and Smoke, one of Tennessee Williams’s lesser appreciated works until Frecknall brought into the mainstream with a deftly staged production. Williams had been ripe for re-evaluation in the last ten years and Benedict Andrews had done some of that foundational work with some stripped back productions of major texts, but this version of Summer and Smoke established what would become a recognisable and highly successful directorial approach in which Frecknall is notably empathetic to the female-centric narratives in existing work.

What was so striking about this production was the emotional beat that Frecknall so carefully elucidated, a powerful and surprising connection between two unlikely people that grows, flames and dies across the course of the play. The clarity of that trajectory and the intensely felt tragedy of two people just missing one another was stark and beautiful. And this has become Frecknall’s trademark, the rethinking of often overlooked female experiences presented with care and contextual understanding of how private grief and trauma drives behaviour. Combined with a simpler, representative staging and accents of music, this star director has opened up not only Williams’s work but also Chekhov and Shakespeare with Lorca to come in the autumn. The effect that Frecknall is having on the London stage is extraordinary and important, rethinking how women are presented through investigative and emotionally-connected approaches to classic texts.

2019 – Pinter at the Pinter

Another star director rose to prominence during the last decade and Jamie Lloyd has demonstrated a similar text-focuses approach while growing into his own distinctive and minimalistic style which has also delivered some of the great revivals of recent years. This reached its apex with the Pinter at the Pinter season celebrating the short works of the writer running from late 2018 into the Spring of 2019. While Pinter is rarely off stage for long, Lloyd’s season was little short of a landmark in understanding this influential writer’s work and seeing the skills of its director develop as the season evolved. This was an education in Pinter for audiences who saw all of the eight shows, broadening out our impressions of the playwright from strange and menacing to a nuanced observer of human life, someone who wrote widely about power, relationships, family and love. Increasing our understanding through careful curation Lloyd actively demonstrated the range and skill of Pinter while also subtly drawing attention to the technical accomplishment of his works, building from the accessible stories set in totalitarian states to the complex linguistic poetry of the closing double bill A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter where Pinter’s vocabulary choices create worlds of meaning about class, power and human worth as well as atmospheric tension and drama.

And this season shaped its director as well, giving Lloyd the text-focused tools that have allowed him to find deeper emotional purpose in other classic works, and placing the interior experience of character at the heart of otherwise denuded productions. The simplicity of staging and faith in the meaning and elegance of the writing resulted in a gripping and devastating version of Betrayal at the end of the Pinter season as well as a subsequent Playhouse run (interrupted by the pandemic) that included heart-stopping new versions of Cyrano de Bergerac and The Seagull. You felt Lloyd grow into the director he was always meant to be because of the Pinter at the Pinter season, and the theatre he makes, like Frecknall and van Hove, has the capacity to reach beyond the surface, digging deep into the text and the emotional responses of its audiences.

2020 – The Death of England: Delroy

With pandemic closures, just being in a theatre again took on an added emotional resonance for audiences and never more so than the production that, albeit temporarily, reopened the Olivier Theatre, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s The Death of England: Delroy, easily one of the most important play cycles of the twenty-first century. Now a quadrilogy, this series of two monologues and two duologues has captured and reflected on the anatomy of modern Britain, the slow to change embedded and systemic racism that shapes daily life, and the casual assumptions that are inherited between generations. This second play was the point at which the series established itself as a rounded exploration of contemporary British identity, placing the experience of initial protagonist Michael in the context of his best friend Delroy as the consequences of their long association and behaviour to one another interacted across notions of Black British identity – one of the most important theatrical themes in this period – and the expectations of masculinity in working class lives and families.

Other plays including Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night and Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights have also been essential to the exploration of the Black British experience and the new prominence given to some of these stories and voices are vitally shaping what modern theatre needs to look like. But Dyer and Williams have most consistently articulated the complexities of self and community emerging from the multilayered, complementary and contradictory reflections on identity that this play cycle has captured, creating a nexus between different racial experiences at a macro and micro level in society. A male-focused piece (at least until the final chapter is played in September), the infusion of themes including male vulnerability, the expectations of fatherhood as well as the enduring impact of verbal and physical violence on generations of men have made The Death of England series a watershed in not only writing but also staging work that considers second and third generation immigrant identities of all kinds, unpicking, claiming and celebrating all the ways there are to be British.

2021 – Cruise

By no means the first or only play to represent the LGTBQIA perspective in the last decade, Jack Holden’s Cruise was however the culmination of the work that had gone before and established a new intergenerational understanding that has begun to reframe notions of inherited trauma, support within the community and collective purpose. Opening in a major West End theatre after premiering online, Cruise also signaled a shift in ideas about the stories told in larger commercial venues and who is allowed to tell them, returning to the West End in 2022 and now playing to great acclaim in Manchester. The impact of Cruise and the platform it has given to the breadth possible in a single writer-performer show will continue to be felt in the years ahead, where the ambition and scale of stories told by individuals is already changing.

Telling the dual tale of a contemporary gay man and his equivalent in the 1980s, Holden’s show asked interesting questions about the impact of the Aids epidemic on Soho and its importance in shaping LGTBQIA identities in subsequent generations, especially for those born long after this pivotal period. The sharing of knowledge and nurturing of young men still cast out by family and friends based on their sexuality connects the two eras, along with the importance of learning from and appreciating the trauma of early generations. This cultural, geographical and identity sharing concept was drawn together in Cruise as Holden’s character thought deeply about the connections between past, present and future, and what it means to be part of a community partially defined by its historic suffering. Moving beyond the behemoth plays like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (also revived in the last ten years), like Dyer and Williams, Cruise focused on everyday life for ordinary people exploring strong cultural identities in contemporary Britain that builds meaningfully on the work and lived experience of those who came before.

2022 – Oklahoma!

Musical theatre has changed substantially in the last decade, not just in the development of new shows but the reconfiguration of existing and sometimes problematic ones, and this art form returned stronger from the pandemic, adapting to new technologies and with a renewed energy for inventiveness. The 2022 production of Oklahoma! at the Young Vic transferred from America and came to symbolise all of the advances made by the genre in the last 10 years, building on the foundational reimagining work that multiple directors and creatives have applied to classic texts in a new era, responding openly and directly to changing morality and contemporary experiences. From Jamie Lloyd’s Evita to Daniel Evans’s hughely resonant South Pacific, Rebecca Frecknall’s Cabaret and Timothy Sheader’s Carousel, these productions have grappled with the racial complexities of their subject matter, sexual coercion and power shifts that have contributed to the bold progression of the musical in this period.

Oklahoma! was again the culmination of all of these approaches that have taken the genre a step further by playing with expected audience reactions. Daniel Fish’s production was a rare theatre experience, one that sent you home with feelings of considerable unease about the story and the characters. This usually upbeat, sunny love story soured beautifully on stage, becoming a darker tale of coercion and criminal conspiracy, of male violence and expressive female sexuality that shifted and morphed as the musical unfolded. Performed in stark lighting with film, vocal effects and darkness used to pointed effect, this was an astoundingly unnerving experience, one that became morally muddy. Theatre almost always wants to send its audiences home feeling uplifted and with its problems resolved, but Fish made everyone feel sullied, complicit somehow in some terrible act of destruction that stained us all, pushing the feeling of discomfort and disconcertion in ways that felt experimental and exciting. Musical theatre has certainly become a place to explore more complex responses and its continued evolution is one of the most fascinating developments of recent years.

2023…

With so many productions to come, it may be a little early to speculate on which show from this year is the most indicative of the themes and directions that theatre is currently pursuing, but one show already sits at the intersection of so many of the foundational ideas discussed in this essay. The production of A Little Life, adapted from Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, is helmed by one of the new generation of star directors that have been a feature of this period, with Ivo van Hove’s sparing appreciation for the original text while carefully and meaningfully rearranging it for the stage. It combined discussions of male mental health and vulnerability, LGTBQIA histories and identity, and a complex subject matter that led several critics to question whether self-harm is an appropriate subject for audiences. A powerful and insightful piece of theatre, A Little Life has filled two West End houses and earned a cinema recording, combined content and form with the literary basis, political and social purpose which so many of the plays in this selection have highlighted, perhaps the ultimate representation of 10 years in mainstream London theatre.

…. and Beyond

Much has changed in the ten years that Cultural Capital has existed and many different stories could be told about that period through its key productions, writers, creatives and developments in content that this piece has explored. Pick an entirely different selection and perhaps other themes would emerge, while a focus on only regional or only fringe would highlight the many great things about the existing theatre ecosystem but also the many challenges of representation, funding and decision-making not included here. There are also other reflections that have not been made in this piece on the nature of theatre criticism itself, who gets to do it, the reductive value of star ratings and how the industry interacts with a diversity of critics and theatre writers in an increasingly social media driven promotional context.

But there is still a place for long form criticism, an opportunity to reflect in detail on individual shows and the wider connections that can and should be made between all of these isolated productions. There are clear and direct lines of thought from Coriolanus in 2013 to A Little Life in 2023, and it is possible to see that evolution through these shows and reflect on how the theatre we have now came to be. And while a few are still running either in the West End or regionally, some even available to watch online, all of this is just a memory. Theatre is a transcendental state, gone before you know it and what matters, what always matters is what’s next. So let’s find out…

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