Proofs of The Letters of Noel Coward and a new book about the Royal Court Theatre arrived at The Spectator together and their conjunction made me wonder, who is winning? In 1956 Look Back in Anger arrived in Sloane Square and is supposed to have blasted the genteel primness from the London stage forever. A motley group were roped together as Angry Young Men (Iris Murdoch? Angus Wilson?) and stood for the future. Naturally this could not quite be true overnight but the new playwrights flourished and multiplied, new actors with new accents became stars, the plays transferred to the West End and Broadway. Soon the Royal Court directors made films and money, they joined the National Theatre. They seemed to have won.
Fifty years have passed, there is the usual panic about a dearth of new plays, but who are now more revived, the Old Masters or The Slightly Less Old Masters? If Harold Pinter is the Captain of the Royal Court team and has The Hothouse at the Royal National Theatre, Noel Coward, his opposite number, joins him there next week with Present Laughter. A ‘new’ play by Terence Rattigan, Man and Boy, recently ran satisfactorily, but David Storey’s In Celebration has just finished a comparable season. Edward Bond’s The Sea is to appear at the very grandest of West End theatres, The Haymarket, I have heard of no plans for a William Douglas-Home revival, Enid Bagnold is not a name to conjure with. It seems that the rebels have, as one would expect and hope, joined the Establishment and dominate it; and of course Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has never been away.
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