THE ARTS:Michael Billington's latest book is an attempt to justify spending 40 years watching thousands of shows while reviewing theatre, although he is his own worst critic, writes Peter Crawley
BY HIS OWN ADMISSION, Michael Billington doesn't switch off easily. Even now, sitting in the rare sunshine of a summer's day in Galway, his notebook rests by his hand, just in case. "Things leap out at you," he says. "You never know." Staying alert to cultural clues and alive to patterns comes with the territory, of course. And as Britain's longest-serving theatre critic, Billington has watched some 8,000 performances over more than 40 years, offering his interpretations, arguments and verdicts on an almost daily basis - most of them in the Guardian, the newspaper for which he has written since 1971. An indefatigable writer, now in his late 60s, Billington tends to see trends and correlations everywhere. Even so, it's surprising to hear him apply his expertise to the cricket pitch.
"People used to go to cricket and watch cricket," he says with a characteristic tone of wry amusement (and just a soupçon of nostalgia).
"They now dress up in fancy dress. They go in drag. I find it quite extraordinary. Why you'd want to sit in drag for six hours - dressed as nuns! - and watch test cricket . . . " Far from being nonplussed, however, Billington relates it to a wider trend and neatly returns our conversation to home ground.
"It's as if everyone feels that merely to be a spectator is to be subsidiary," he says. "You have to validate your existence by becoming part of the event. All I'm saying is theatre has to find increasing ways of acknowledging the audience."
If that seems like an unlikely dialogue to discern between two seemingly unrelated fields, Billington has rarely observed rigid barriers between art and life. (A couple of months ago he even identified dramatic peripeteia within the flow of a Premier League darts tournament.) As his recent book, State of the Nation, begins: "a professional preoccupation with drama does not, I hope, preclude a fascination with the wider world." A compelling selective chronicle of British theatre since 1945, peppered with references, anecdotes and arguments, it is as much a personal history as a theatrical history. It is, as he puts it "a disguised autobiography", where his life humbly entwines with the art he describes.
"Part of the reason for writing the book was to make sense of what I'd been doing for the last 40 years or so," he says. "As a critic, you become an accumulation of the plays you've seen, really. And there comes an urge at some point to stand back a bit and say, Well, what's going on? Is there a pattern or a shape to the work I've been watching and to the life I've been leading? And I suppose to justify it, in a curious way. To say, I hope I haven't been watching a series of discrete, one-off plays. That what I've been watching has been an evolutionary narrative about the state of the country I live in." Hence the attention paid to the plays that best reflect, in his favoured phrase, "the temper of the times", the state-of-the-nation dramas from JB Priestley and John Osborne to Tom Stoppard and David Hare, which became "the animating force in British drama".
A nation has porous boundaries though. In his public interview at the Galway Arts Festival last month, Billington quoted Kenneth Tynan's remark that "English drama is a procession of glittering Irishmen". Given that he was also taking in Enda Walsh's latest, The New Electric Ballroom, originally a German commission from an Irish writer based in England and currently storming Scotland, does the age of globalisation make state-of-the-nation dramas harder to come by? "I don't think it does, actually," he considers. "I think that theatre remains a means of affirming and defining identity at a time when the notion of identity is itself questionable. In other words, theatre becomes almost the last refuge of asserting national character. And although in my book I apply my arguments predominantly, obviously, to the UK, I get the impression that one of the reasons for the health of Irish drama is that it is applying itself to these questions: who are we, what are we in this new modern EU world?"
Billington's own identity, intellectually curious, markedly left-leaning and unapologetically subjective, has always been conspicuous in his writing. "I would say any critic worth his or her salt is obviously going to be a collection of beliefs: moral, political, sexual, social. We all bring a certain baggage to reviewing plays." He makes no secret of his personal preferences, prioritising the writer as the central figure in drama and responding most fervently to the artist engagé.
"I like plays that relate politics to psychology and the private world to the public world," he says. "I've said this for the last 40 years. I don't think I'm alone." Billington is no bolshie killjoy, though. He agrees with Eric Bentley's assertion that farce is the quintessence of theatre (although he finds little room for it in his book), and would like to kill the notion, "that I'm some sort of Malvolio of theatrical criticism or a deep puritan who hates fun". Even in fripperies, though, he tends to discern a politics of form, nowhere more strikingly than in the rise of the musical during the 1980s.
"It was a perfect collision," he says. "Thatcher embodies individualism, profit, spurious uplift, trying to create a society that wouldn't question things too much. At the same time, there is Andrew Lloyd Webber, along with Cameron Mackintosh, producing all these hit musicals one after another." These mega-entertainments, he says, offered "a decorative escapism" and a capacity for their makers to earn profits "hitherto undreamed of in theatre". But British theatre is still dealing with the consequences: a decline of Government subsidy and the bottom-line focus of commercial concerns.
"We're still living with the Thatcherite belief that somehow profit and money are the ultimate test of everything. I think we apply this increasingly to the arts as we do everything else. If I'm nostalgic, it's for a pre-Thatcherite world where there were certain values that were worshipped for their own sake," he says, invoking the early purpose of the BBC and the Arts Council as "shining beacons of civilization. And I find that one by one these beacons are being, if not extinguished, then dimmed."
If theatre is constantly fighting for survival, criticism itself is no stranger to attack. Billington has more direct experience of this than most: in the late 1970s the burly dramatist David Storey assaulted him in the stairwell of the Royal Court after Billington had labelled his play, Mother's Day, "A stinker." "Critics have always been attacked, and rightly so," he says today, rather gamely. Still, there is something a tad masochistic in reprinting the more vituperative submissions to the Guardian'smailbag in his compendium of reviews, One Night Stands. And he has never stopped abasing himself for his initial rapid reactions towards Harold Pinter's Betrayal("high-class soap-opera") and Sarah Kane's Blasted("naive tosh"), both of which he has recanted at every opportunity.
"I think it's inevitable," he says of the great tradition of critics getting it wrong, "the artist will always be ahead of the critic." If the one fundamental quality required of a critic is honesty, as he says, they must also be honest about their misreadings. Besides, he adds: "Self-flagellation is a great public spectacle and readers seem to like it. Particularly in journalists."
WHEN BILLINGTON joined the Guardianin 1971, he recalls the satisfaction of a dream job tempered with stabs of anxiety created by a decade of political crisis. "While dramatic criticism was personally fulfilling," he reflects in State of the Nation, "was it making any useful contribution to society? My only answer to a nagging puritan conscience was to work remorselessly hard and to encourage, perhaps indiscriminately, dramatists who addressed the political issues of the time."
Does he think the critic can make a difference? "I think so," he says. "It's the job of the critic to keep nagging away at this; to ask what's happening to great drama? To attack the Arts Council when they make stupid mistakes. I think the critic has a duty to agitate as well as inform and enlighten." That's partly why, despite the fisticuffs, Billington doesn't see the artist and the critic as inescapably antagonistic.
"In the end, what unites the critic and the artist - a love of the medium - is greater than what divides us." Indeed, he will soon direct a production of Pinter plays with students from the London Academy of Music. It's unusual for a critic, the professional outsider, to cross into theatre-making, but Billington has done this twice before - 20 years ago for a Marivaux play with a group of RSC actors and again, 10 years later, for a season of plays directed by critics at the Battersea Arts Centre. Asked in Battersea if the experience would change him as a critic, Billington simply responded: "Well, it can't make me any worse."
Much like the five years spent writing State of the Nation, directing provides Billington with another angle of appreciation, experiencing the art form from within, adding experience to a uniquely well-rounded life in the theatre. He feels, as ever, "perversely sanguine" about the future of the medium. "You could list lots of reasons why you think the theatre may be in trouble," he says. "And yet there's a kind of obstinate public appetite for theatre. I think it's to do with this hunger for a communal experience in an age that's isolating us all. People want to engage with other people, to combat the solitude and fragmentation of their working lives and even their private lives. And theatre has this great capacity to take the moral temperature of the times."
He smiles. "Then again, I would say that, wouldn't I?"
• State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 is published by Faber and Faber (£25)
