London Theatre: The most revived plays in the capital

Theatre revivals are everywhere in London this summer,  but what are the most revived plays in the capital, and why do they keep coming back? By  Ruth Mattock .

David Hare’s Skylight has reeled in rave reviews on its second turn on the London stage, the capital is awash with theatre revivals. Hare’s lesser known The Vertical Hour is enjoying its own second run at the Park Theatre, Miller’s The Crucible  is back after a four-year pause, at the Old Vic with fresh-from-Middle-Earth actor Richard Armitage, and Wilde’s plummy classic The Importance of Being Earnest opens at the Harold Pinter theatre. All this revamping has got us thinking about which plays have returned most often to London’s theatres, and what draws us to go and see them again and again.

It’s a difficult question to answer without spending the summer breathing programme dust in the Westminster archives, but we’ve had a shallow rummage, and the results were surprising.

International plays

Why, for instance, have the National Theatre and Old Vic done The Importance of being Earnest only once between them, and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard five times? In fact there’s a distinctly international character to the handful of particularly common plays in London with Tennessee Williams, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller and Anton Chekhov appearing as often as Wilde, George Bernard Shaw or Tom Stoppard.

The Cherry Orchard , explains Brian Walters of the Literary team at the National, “manages to capture a moment in time, the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of the bourgeoisie,” all within the template of a family drama. It straddles the border of today and timelessness. Miller’s The Crucible, too, cloaks its extremely topical subject of McCarthy era America in the much more distant and mysterious Salem witch trials, all the while maintaining an exciting odour of anti-establishment feeling. 

Room for innovation

Incoming director of the National Theatre Rufus Norris recently acknowledged the expectations of new and controversial works at the National, based on his own untraditional career. But, he noted, this will surprise no-one - “What might be more interesting is to see my Othello." Plays from the literary canon test creativity, and the best can accommodate the most traditional period production alongside the wackiest interpretations.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, well on its way into literary history, is a case in point .It won the top spot as most popular play in the National Theatre’s NT2000 public poll, and finds its way into every kind of theatre, including the Barbican, the Royal Court, the National as well as the Young Vic and twice at the Southwark Playhouse since 1993. Peter Hall wrote in 2003 that Godot had changed theatre forever. Tom Palmer, who played Vladimir in the acclaimed recent production at the Arcola Theatre, found the experience a strange one: “some audiences experienced it very much as a comedy, laughing throughout even at the most painful moments, other audiences were quiet, tense, too nervous to laugh and it seemed like the jokes became so steeped in sadness that they took on a whole new meaning.”

Age before beauty

Waiting for Godot is a spry young thing compared to the other most popular plays; at least three are from pre-1650, and that’s not counting Shakespeare. They include Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (upcoming at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) and The Duchess of Malfi , which in 2010 had its most successful year in the theatre, 400 years after its first performance.

These two plays remind us that if there’s anything we love on the stage, it’s a healthy literary dose of sex and death. There’s hardly a comedy in sight amongst the most popular plays (except the National’s four-times penchant for the ‘comedy’ Measure for Measure , and that’s hardly a barrel of laughs). ‘Tis Pity is overflowing with incest and murder, and Michael Billington wrote approvingly of Eve Best’s 2012 Duchess “not since Hitchcock's Torn Curtain have I seen a strangling as protracted and plausible”.

But all the strangulation and sibling fantasy in the world won’t alone keep a play on the stage for 400 years, and the Duchess is also a very great role. It is often considered the female Hamlet, a title also applied to Ibsen’s pistol-wielding Hedda Gabler . Hedda has been played by actresses including Ingrid Bergman, Isabelle Huppert, Maggie Smith, and Cate Blanchett, and variously interpreted as “victim, manipulator, feminist, and each interpretation is a justified approach” (Walters). Hedda has been reviewed in the Guardian eight times since 1998, and that’s just in the big theatres.

Only the brave

Such big characters are not only food for an audience. Geoffrey Colman, broadcaster and Head of Acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, told us how heavily the above plays feature in a stage career; “they are the coordinates of how to make a great actor.”

It’s on the subject of great roles that we come to fill the gaping hole you’ll have noticed in the discussion so far - Shakespeare. If we were counting the Bard’s works there’d be no need for this discussion at all, as it’s Hamlet , Macbeth , and Lear who strut before an audience more than any other character. The National has done each of these at least four times since its opening in 1963, and the Barbican, which seems to have covered almost everything but only once since 1997, has produced four London Hamlets and three Macbeths. These are the career markers for any respected actor (or actress - Michael Billington cites Angela Winkler in his top 10 Hamlets), as grand swan song or the first serious beating of career wings. These, and the other plays returning again and again to the London stage, are proof that familiarity only breeds a bigger challenge, and intensifies creativity.

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