Now that Sonia Friedman and Channel 4’s The Play’s The Thing has reached its theatrical climax with the opening night of On the Third Day, the winning entry that resulted at the New Ambassadsors, it’s time not just for the reviews (you can read my own elsewhere on this site), but also to review what, if anything, it has taught us. Certainly it has been interesting to be a fly-on-the-wall of the process of choosing a play for production, and finding that needle in a haystack of over 2,000 entries; but it also seems strange to have done so on the basis of just a scene and a synopsis that were then pushed into development under the scrutiny of the cameras. Just as musicals are about more than their songs, so plays are about more than single scenes or an ability to craft dialogue, but are about the complete picture of what they are trying to tell us.
And even if there’s a paucity of new plays in the West End, as I identified here a few days ago that this is an attempt to redress, lots of new plays open all the time, of course, at the Royal Court, Hampstead, the Bush, Soho, Tricycle, Old Red Lion and numerous other theatres up and down the country. They may also get good, bad or indifferent reviews along the way. But this one has been brutally exposed, in every sense. While The Times’ typically generous and benign Benedict Nightingale opened his review by commenting, “One would have to be a blend of Scrooge, Rumpelstiltskin and Cruella de Vil not to wish this piece well”, he went on to say, “But as any publisher will tell you, slush piles seldom conceal masterpieces”.
But are the false, manufactured conditions of this competition the type of environment in which to produce a good play, anyway? True, the West End makes up its own rules as it goes along — being unsubsidised, it can do whatever it wishes to do, providing it can raise the funds to be able to do so. But as The Independent’s Paul Taylor puts it, while he completely understands the frustrations of Friedman at the difficulty of initiating new work in the unsubsidised sector, “What I don’t comprehend is what she thought she would prove by collaborating with reality TV. In the world of the latter, the stakes have always got to be melodramatically high, people must be seen to lose and the competitive framework (luxuriously bolstered by high-profile experts, purely because the cameras are rolling) cannot be adjusted to provide a workable model for future development.” He then adds his own suggestion for doing so: “From the point of view of finding new talent, it would have been better to spend the money on a mini-festival at the Bush or the Gate. But that would not have been invidious enough for TV, which will never be theatre’s route to rescue.”
In fact, television companies have a long history of sponsoring new writing venues, and an even richer history, of course, of plundering its writers for tv work. But this exposure of the difficulties of producing new plays could yet have its own disastrous postscript: can the play possibly survive for its scheduled 12 week run? And if it can’t, what does that say for the prospects of new talent reaching the West End again?
