Status Updates From State of the Nation: Britis...

There’s a good mention of Roy Williams 2002 play ‘Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads’ which was first performed in the National’s newly converted Loft Theatre above the Cottesloe before eventually transferring back down to that space. Paul Moriarty was an excellent as a senior figure in a BNP type movement.

I’ve now reached the chapter on the 1980s which Billington opens with a diatribe on what he views as the pernicious rise and dominance of musicals on British theatre arguing that in many ways the financing structures of them mirrored Thatcherite principles. It is with some singular ire that he criticises long term effects of the RSCs collaboration with Cameron Macintosh with ‘Les Miserables’.

Just read the opening chapter covering the immediate post war years of 1945-50 and it’s fascinating how theatre perhaps more so than film or literature reflected Britain’s changing political, social and cultural landscape.