Shouts and Murmurs - December 17, 2024
How Simon Russell Beale convinced me to keep writing about theatre. Plus: the best theatre writing elsewhere.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts And Murmurs, a weekly email for paid supporters of The Crush Bar, written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Every week, I round up the best theatre writing elsewhere - news, reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, long-reads - plus any other interesting or inspiring theatre stuff I find.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
2024 was the year I fell out of love with theatre.
Maybe it was the torrent of bad news: the funding snubs, the spiralling costs, the shrinking programmes, the closing venues, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.
Maybe it was the fact that I felt uninspired by the shows about which I was writing. Scottish theatre is in an economic and artistic slump right now. The Edinburgh Fringe is full of solo shows about awful things. And, on the rare occasions I make it to London, the West End seems full of soulless musicals adapted from movies.
Maybe it was the nagging sense that theatre has become an irrelevance in modern society, that the kind of cultural conversations I want to be involved in no longer centre on theatre shows but on books, films and television series, and that theatre is preoccupied with fulfilling all the important social responsibilities that successive governments have neglected instead of, you know, making theatre.
Maybe it was making a podcast series about how great things used to be. Maybe it was pumping out loads and loads of content and not getting paid enough for it. Maybe it is that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Maybe it was all of those things and more.
Either way, earlier this Autumn, I was profoundly disenchanted with theatre and increasingly uncertain that I wanted to spend the rest of my career writing about it.
Then, several things happened in quick succession. Firstly, I saw a show that I loved, that set me on fire in a way that hasn’t happened for a while. It was Till The Stars Come Down, Beth Steel’s remarkable ensemble state-of-the-nation play about a family falling apart over the course of a wedding day that is hilariously funny, desperately moving, and piercingly insightful all at once. I watched it on NT at Home and I adored it.
Secondly, to the surprise of the entire Scottish culture sector, the Scottish government actually fulfilled a funding promise instead of backtracking, u-turning, or employing creative arithmetic – and upped its culture spending by £34 million for 2025/26.
And thirdly, I interviewed the great Simon Russell Beale, ahead of him appearing in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention Of Love at the Hampstead Theatre. It was one of the best interviews I have ever done and I am quite proud of it. You can read it here.
Why? Well, partly because Russell Beale was such a charming, humble, candid and insightful interviewee; partly because I admire his voracious academic curiosity and share his belief that the best drama has intellectual rigour; and partly because of something he said towards the end of our hour-long conversation over Zoom.
Russell Beale had just answered a question about whether The Invention Of Love and its portrait of the poet and Latin scholar AE Housman was relevant today.
“I think it is a constriction to worry about relevance,” he had said. “There’s a speech that I give in the play all about knowledge. I say: “A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.” I love that speech. It resonates with me. I like the fact that, however small and irrelevant your work is, it is actually contributing to the sum of knowledge.”
Then, in a clunky segue, I asked Russell Beale whether he applied that logic to his work in theatre. I was curious as to whether someone as experienced and acclaimed as Russell Beale shared my anxiety about theatre’s relevance, and what he did with it.
“That’s a very interesting question,” he said. “I suppose it is always at the back of your mind. Perhaps theatre is a bit of a sideshow now, although Wicked has just been turned into a film. The biggest movie of the year started as a theatre show. Perhaps theatre only has a relevance when it is adapted into another medium now.”
“No, I don’t think that, actually,” he added. “That implies it is all about numbers, that something is only important if a lot of people see it. I don’t believe that. I still believe theatre has weight and relevance. I suppose I would fall back on the Tom Stoppard argument in The Invention Of Love: ‘There is no little too little to be worth having.”
I have realised that I agree. I have realised that a show matters even if no-one sees it. I have realised that this newsletter matters, even if no-one reads it. I have realised that theatre matters, even if it has not been a particularly inspiring year. I take heart in the belief that cultural relevancy is superficial and temporary; that any show with at least one interesting thought behind it - so not, say, The Devil Wears Prada - is worth making; and any commentary on theatre with at least some insight is worth writing. Who am I to disagree with a three-time Olivier Award winner, after all?
So, 2024 was the year I fell out of love with theatre – but it was also the year I fell back in love with it, thanks to Beth Steel, the Scottish government, and Simon Russell Beale. And if you also find yourself questioning the value of theatre or your work within it this Christmas - or whenever, actually - I would encourage you to remember Stoppard’s wise words: “There is no little too little to be worth having.”
In other news: the Welsh government increased culture spending but not by enough; the ACE review will go ahead; Freaky Friday is the latest movie to get the musical treatment; Ipswich’s Regent’s Theatre will get a £3.45m revamp; Dundee Rep might lose its council funding; Jamie Lloyd will direct Evita; we won’t get a Raygun musical.