Seven wonders of the world (of theatre)

But tonight I’ll be back in the stalls to catch up at last on the Old Vic’s revival of Noises Off which opened while I was away, but I’ve seen in both its previous major West End outings: the transfer of the original production from Lyric Hammersmith to the Savoy, and then again in the last revival at the National that also transferred to the Piccadilly. One young critic Matt Trueman confidently wrote after seeing the current revival that the play is “one of the seven wonders of post-war theatre.”

The post-war theatre has produced some iconic plays, and Noises Off is, to be sure, a classic example of a farce about a farce, so brilliant in fact that it closed off the entire genre to writers for a generation, including Frayn himself in his own misfiring meta-theatre sequel Look Look. Likewise, the stage thriller was formally consigned to history after Peter Shaffer’s Sleuth took its own axe to it.

So if a show’s success can be measured by the impact it has on a wider generation of theatre making, what might the other six wonders of post-war theatre be? 

I’d personally have to start with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim — as Jeremy Sams once told me some years ago, “I venerate him as a human being and an artist. The only thing I have against him is that he’s covered every exit and nailed it up, and it’s very, very hard for everybody else. I’ve been listening to a lot of new musicals recently, and they either sound like Stephen or they so haven’t been influenced by him that his ghost is there in absentia. He is as big to musicals as Wagner is to opera, and the history of the musical will never be the same again until he is written out of it. And that will take a century.”

Sondheim has played with form in every musical he has written - one of his wittiest songs is called “I Never Do Anything Twice”, and his own career is living proof of that fact — so it’s hard to single out one show from them all that has nailed the exits more than the rest, but two shows, at least, which opened back-to-back with each other in the early 70s, proved that musicals would never be the same again.

Company, which originally premiered in 1970, revolutionised musicals by being about a concept instead of a plot, with the action set as a series of personal vignettes and sketches, possibly swirling around inside its leading character’s head; while Follies, the next year, marked a radical departure that paid tribute to a former era of musical entertainment in a dazzling study of imploding relationships that was literally about nailing the exits to a theatre that was going to be torn down and lives that its characters longed to escape from. And those are precisely the exits that Sams has said Sondheim has himself nailed up against those who have come after him.

But if Sondheim has been the dominant force in musical theatre transatlantically for the second half of the last century, in the UK we produced Andrew Lloyd Webber who also became a global force, and likewise broke new ground with two of his earliest shows Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita that again changed and challenged the form, driving it back to through-sung opera that came to dominate the musical for a while and lead directly to Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, amongst others.

Then there’s Mamma Mia!, of course, which ushered in a new generation of jukebox musicals constructed out of pop back catalogues that has changed the form again. Pop revues have long been with us, but Mamma Mia!, folding established songs into a new plot-led musical comedy, creating an often-imitated new genre that has led to such horrors as We Will Rock You and Rock of Ages.

Sondheim, Lloyd Webber and Mamma Mia! can therefore be said to be theatrical wonders for their wider and lasting impact on musical theatre; but what of plays, beyond Noises Off, that are theatrical wonders for ushering in new eras? Most obviously, of course, there’s John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which blew the cobwebs of dusty drawing-room plays that held sway until then in the West End and introduced a new age of theatrical realism in the theatre.

It followed hard upon Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which went in the opposite direction to provide a daring poetic metaphor on the nature of existence itself. Harold Pinter’s desolate dramas would follow and re-work a heightened kind of realism with a different kind of theatricality.

But looking through the National Theatre’s One Hundred Plays of the Century list, created by a poll of playwrights, actors, directors, journalists and other theatre people at the turn of the 21st century, it’s difficult to single out which of those from 1945 onwards should qualify as ‘seven wonders of the post-war theatre’.

My own choices, from the NT’s list, would be Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for changing the nature of post-war American drama; Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (the latter supposedly overturning the former, but in fact both lending a charged intensity to their layered domestic settings — while Rattigan’s play is in the fact the one that changed my own life, as I’ve previously written here); Waiting for Godot and Noises Off (variations on an existential theme; one about filling in the time, the other about trying to — and failing — to hold off the chaos); and Martin Sherman’s Bent, for changing gay theatre forever.

What are yours? And what plays (and musicals) were missing from the NT’s list?