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Mary Poppins sniffs as if at a slightly improper suggestion when Mrs Banks brings up the subject of references. “I make it a rule never to give references,” she declares airily to the mother of Jane and Michael Banks in the stage musical, now in previews at London’s Prince Edward Theatre. “A very old-fashioned idea to my mind,” she adds, with a faint hint of Lady Bracknell. “The best people never require them.” She’s not being rude, exactly, but her tone leaves little doubt about who is interviewing whom in this encounter.
This suggestion of inscrutability – of the stern, slightly droll briskness with which she refuses to explain herself to anybody – is a characteristic which literature’s predominant diva of the nursery shares with her creator, PL Travers , who first wrote about her in a book published in 1934. It’s not that Mary Poppins needs to fear adverse testimonials from previous employers. It’s more that a testimonial might well expose those glaring, imponderable gaps in her back story. How would you get your bearings on a figure who seems to have blown in on the east wind, “to have existed as long as recorded time and to be friendly with the powers of the universe”? That’s how she’s described by Richard Eyre , director of the stage-musical version.
First seen at this address 15 years ago, the production touches down after a spate of works have complicated and enriched the Mary Poppins phenomenon. Will it prove to be “ahead of the #MeToo curve”, as Cameron Mackintosh , the show’s co-creator, puts it? And will it be more relevant than ever in its take on banking, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Chief among the works that have taken up a place in the Poppins archive is Saving Mr Banks (2013). It’s a movie that revealingly focuses on how resistant the prickly, fastidious Travers (superbly played by Emma Thompson ) was to selling the screen rights to her books to Walt Disney, and how phobic she remained to the 1964 movie, with its magical blend of live action and animation.
Regardless of the fact that it bestowed on Travers the freedom to kvetch all the way to the bank (with a deal that entitled her to 5 per cent of the profits), she persisted in dismissing Disney’s film as a sentimental travesty. Saving Mr Banks also movingly traces the personal roots of the Poppins dramatis personae back to the author’s own Australian childhood. Her beloved father (portrayed by Colin Farrell ) was a failed banker and alcoholic dreamer who died when his daughter was seven. Bringing a much-needed sense of order to a household that had been further unravelled by the suicidal breakdown of her mother, Travers’ severe, kindly, pointy-toed Aunt Ellie is identified as a model for Poppins herself.
So the cryptic caginess that is a matter of quirky instinct in Poppins seems to have arisen from a more constrained desire for privacy in the author. She sought to escape from her troubled Australian past by reinventing herself – coming to England, changing her name (Helen Lyndon Goff adopted a nom de plume derived from the name of her father Travers Robert Goff), and setting up first as a professional actor (she played Titania in a 1920s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ) and then as a lady of letters. By the time Poppins saw the light of day, she was mixing in highbrow Irish literary circles and publishing poetry and criticism in the little magazines. With a pedigree as splotchy as hers, you might well want your official record to shade off into a kind of assertive indeterminacy.
40 of the greatest plays ever writtenShow all 40 1 /4040 of the greatest plays ever written 40 of the greatest plays ever written Life is a Dream (1635), Calderon de la Barca Calderon's play is one of the masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age. The predicament of the young prince, Segismundo, calls to mind the Chinese sage's story of the man who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes to wonder whether he is actually a butterfly dreaming he is a man. This youth is at the mercy of political fluctuation: he's been imprisoned in a dark tower from birth because of a horoscope that predicted he would usurp the throne. Then, when there are anxieties about the succession, his father has him drugged, brought to the Palace, and bafflingly treated like a prince. A poetic piece that tackles deep metaphysical, political matters in a dazzlingly theatrical way. PT
JOHAN PERSSON
40 of the greatest plays ever written Hamlet (1599-1602), William Shakespeare A play of astonishing breakthroughs. There had been plenty of soliloquies in Elizabethan drama beforehand. But no-one had ever talked to an audience like Hamlet. He doesn't just let you into his confidence, he lets you into his consciousness; the best portrayals make you feel that you are soul-to-soul with this figure. It's his capacity for searching introspection that gets in the way and disqualifies Hamlet as a revenge hero: he's rather wonderfully miscast. Hamlet is brilliantly self-reflexive, constantly probing its own theatricality. The conscience of Claudius is tested by a play-within-a play; Hamlet tries to fool the court by assuming an “antic disposition” that may at times waver into authentic madness. The piece is like a painful meditation on the contradicting meanings of the verb to “act” – to feign and to intervene. Inexhaustible. PT
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40 of the greatest plays ever written Machinal (1928), Sophie Treadwell Feminism and expressionism collide in US playwright Sophie Treadwell's extraordinary vision of a mechanised, dehumanising metropolis. We feel the nerve-shredding racket of modern existence – described as “this purgatory of noise” – assaulting the Everywoman character at every stage as she makes her descent to doom. She's a stenographer, a sensitive cog in the machine who is blackmailed by her mother into marriage with a boss who revolts her, and ends up condemned to the electric chair for murdering him. Treadwell's nagging dialogue, with its jangly staccato and syncopated telegraphese, uncannily anticipates Harold Pinter and David Mamet. Her cry against institutionalised misogyny – “I will not submit” – resounds down the ages. PT
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Government Inspector (1836), Nikolai Gogol In Gogol's great phantasmagoric farce, an impecunious clerk newly arrived from St Petersburg is mistakenly assumed to be the eponymous inspector by the corrupt mayor and officials of this provincial town. Panic drives these paranoid locals to project a false identity onto this stranger. That would have been a good enough joke. Gogol, though, gives it an inspired, twist. His penniless nonenity turns out to be driven by an equivalent dread of being recognised as one of life's losers. So when he twigs to their exploitable mistake, he treats their absurd respect (not to mention their bribes) as long-overdue recognition of his true worth and becomes airborne with grandiosity. It's the interlocking lunacies that generate the comic delirium in this Russian masterpiece. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Old Times (1971), Harold Pinter One of Pinter's most haunting and unnerving pieces. A married couple, Kate and Deeley, play games of power and possessiveness with the wife's former flatmate, Anna, who comes to visit for the first time in 20 years. The piece is horribly preoccupied with the use people make of selective – and conceivably invented – memories as weapon or way of gaining the upper hand. We mint memories, in this understanding of it, in response to the psychological needs of the moment: “There are things I remember which may never have happened, but as I recall them.” Deeley is threatened by Anna's youthful relationship to his wife and strongly attracted to the newcomer. There’s a wonderful evocation of rackety London when the girls lived as secretaries, but the uneasy comedy of all this turns lethal. PT
Geraint Lewis
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Changeling (1622), Thomas Middleton / Williams Rowley The best Jacobean tragedy outside Shakespeare, The Changeling also seems to anticipate film noir. The heroine hires a shady type to bump off her fiance. This villain has a facial disfigurement, but the piece is alert to how perversely attracted we are to what repels us. The assassin demands her virginity as his blood-money and the slide into shadowy corruption becomes inexorable. There is a subplot in a madhouse that is designed as a distorted mirror of the main action in its obsession with disguise, lunacy, and sex. PT
Shakespeare Globe
40 of the greatest plays ever written Intimate Apparel (2003), Lynn Nottage This Pulitzer-winning American playwright explores the history of her great-grandmother in early 20th century New York. Esther is a black seamstress – unmarried and illiterate – who sews ravishingly beautiful garments for other women to wear on their wedding nights. She gets what could be a last chance of happiness but it's destroyed in circumstances that are never sentimentalised. The sensual feel of fine fabric (her means of supporting and expressing herself) is conveyed with gorgeous descriptive power. Intimate Apparel manages to be uplifting without ever losing its irreverent humour. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Antigone (441BC), Sophocles Sophocles's play is still the most powerful ever written about the conflict between our obligations to the state and our duty to the ties of kinship. Antigone defies her uncle Kreon, the new ruler of Thebes, by burying her brother Polyneikes. He had brought an army against his native city and Kreon, in these politically volatile times, wants his corpse left for the dogs as an exemplary desecration. The philosopher Hegel saw this as the quintessence of true tragedy: not a conflict between good and evil, but between right and right. In fact, productions nowadays tend to come down in favour of Antigone and her self-sacrificing intransigence. PT
EPA
40 of the greatest plays ever written One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), Richard Bean Richard Bean had the inspired idea of transposing Goldoni's 18th century commedia dell'arte romp from Venice to Brighton in 1963. Our jack-the-lad hero – frantically trying to hold down a pair of jobs, unbeknownst to either boss – is a failed skiffle player. The complications are deliciously warped. One character does a bunk to Brighton disguised as her psychotic twin brother who has been bumped off by her posh twit of a boyfriend in a gangland brawl. Still with me? The dialogue is naughty and knowing, but there's a terrific innocent joy to the physical clowning which peaks in the delirious sequence where our hero has to dish up lunch to the two masters at the same time. PT
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written Making Noise Quietly (1986), Robert Holman A supreme example of how a writer can make a play by putting together a triptych of miniatures. Holman was brought up in the pacifist tradition and Making Noise Quietly looks at the long-range effects of war in three chance encounters. In the first, set in a Kent field in 1943, a northern Quaker and an uninhibited London aesthete discuss their reasons for not fighting. In the second, a naval officer arrives to tell a mother of her son’s death in the Falklands War. The third is set in the Black Forest in 1986. An English private, gone AWOL with his disturbed eight-year-old stepson, come into testing collision with a rich German businesswoman who survived the Holocaust. There's a stunning scene in which she draws the little boy out of his dogmatic mutism by her repeated, stern insistence that he says “thank you”; it's uplifing in the end but it's not pretty. Writing of rare sensitivity and cumulative power. PT
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written Private Lives (1930), Noel Coward Though he described it as “the lightest of light comedies”, Private Lives is the Noel Coward play that one would undoubtedly preserve for posterity. He wrote it as a vehicle for himself and Gertrude Lawrence, with indecent speed. The play centres on two divorcees who, five years after their split, bump into each other on adjacent hotel balconies while on the first night of honeymoons with their new spouses. An elegantly contrived coincidence followed by a pattern of cheekily reversed expectations: most comedies end in marriage; this one begins with nobbled nuptials as the couple unceremoniously ditch their second partners and abscond to Paris together. Elyot and Amanda are the kind of flighty egotistical couple that can neither live together nor apart. Anti-romantic comedy soaked in sex (and romance): “Don't quibble Sybil.” PT
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40 of the greatest plays ever written Angels in America (1990-93), Tony Kushner Subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”, Tony Kushner's astonishing two-part play is set in the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s during the right wing administration of Ronald Reagan. The word AIDS was never mentioned by the President, and the struggle to find a cure was hampered by a lack of government recognition. Kushner retaliated by putting gay men centre stage in an epic that shows them fighting to forge their private and public destinies. This is, however, very far from a conventional “issue” play in its glorious ambition. The piece rages from Antarctica and the damaged ozone layer to a baroque heaven that god has abandoned. Prophetic angels crash through ceilings. There are “mutual dream” sequences where people wander in and out of each other' fantasies. The presiding demon of the piece is one of drama's greatest monsters: the incorrigible and shameless Roy Cohn was a real-life Republican fixer (and mentor to the young Donald Trump). PT
Helen Maybanks
40 of the greatest plays ever written Happy Days (1961), Samuel Beckett A middle-aged woman is buried in a mound of earth first up to the waist then, after the interval, up to the neck. It is a sight that has never lost its capacity to startle. Beckett's Winnie prattles away dogged with optimism (“This will have been another happy day”) in a loquacious attempt to stave off hysteria and despair at her encroaching fate. Partly irritating, partly heroic, she brings forth a dotty lyrical monologue that's threaded with genteel half-remembered wisps from the “immortal” classics. Peter Hall, who directed Peggy Ashcroft in the part, rightly pointed out that “Beckett's theatre is as much about mime and physical precision as it is about words”. Except that his texts are great and this one is superb beyond belief. To quote Winnie: “What is that unforgettable line?” PT
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written Long Day’s Journey into Night (1940), Eugene O Neill When O'Neill described Long Day's Journey as a “play of old sorrow, written in blood and tears”, he was barely exaggerating. This enormous autobiographical drama is so raw and unremitting in its revelations about his dysfunctional Irish-Catholic family that the author left instructions – mercifully disobeyed by his widow – that the play was not to be performed until 25 years after his death. You can understand the trepidation. Long Day's Journey plunges deep into the tortured heart of the Tyrones – James, the acclaimed actor who sold out to commercial success, his wife Mary who has recently relapsed into morphine addiction, and their two sons. When the play is under the baton of the right director, it's the like listening to the recapitulations in a great piece of music. You emerge drained but in a state of elating catharsis. PT
Hugo Glendinning
40 of the greatest plays ever written The History Boys (2004), Alan Bennett Hector wants to teach boys knowledge that will last them a lifetime. But the headmaster has become obsessed with government league tables and has hired Irwin to teach them glib, exam-passing techniques. That's the clash at the heart of Alan Bennett's hugely popular hit. It's set at a Yorkshire grammar amongst a group of clever sixth-formers. As with a lot of Bennett's work you can discern a revue-like structure in the play's glorious string of skits, gags, songs and sheer elating silliness. But it's also a brilliant portrait of a maverick teacher. The scene in which the doomed Hector analyses the Hardy poem “Drummer Hodge” with his pupil Posner is unsurpassed in drama as an example of humane teaching. Gay, unhappy Posner also has the play's best joke: “I'm a Jew. I'm small. I'm homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked.” PT
Geraint Lewis
40 of the greatest plays ever written Faith Healer (1979), Brian Friel Frank Hardy, an itinerant Irish faith healer, his wife, and his manager tell four monologues that contradict each other, leaving the audience to question truth and memory, lies and storytelling. Frank struggles to understand his own “gift”, and how his ability to cure comes and goes; Faith Healer is also a parable about the artist and his inspiration. The play foundered when it opened on Broadway, but has since been recognised as a modern classic: in a good production, there’s a trembling sort of power to it. Friel’s writing can be rhythmical, incantatory, but it’s also gorgeously subtle. Although Friel throughout maintains a – crucial – ambivalence, the play attains a sort of transcendent grace of its own. HW
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written John (2015), Annie Baker Plays by this American writer tend to be long, slow – and strangely riveting. It’s hard to pin down what exactly makes John so bewitching. It is set in a kitschy, tat-filled Gettysburg guesthouse, where a fighting young couple interact with the dotty landlady and her blind but visionary friend. The house seems haunted: creepy dolls and pianos start playing themselves. But it’s also haunted by history (it was a civil war hospital), and by the older women’s memories of love, ghosts, and their own mystical experiences. All of this is a little spooky, but also rather emotionally stirring. Baker is also super sharp on the millennial couple’s dying relationship, which opens out into a look at how it’s often women who have to prop up men’s myths, to feed their needy hunger. HW
Stephen Cummiskey
40 of the greatest plays ever written A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Tennessee Williams From “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” to “Stellaaaaaa”, Williams’s play has entered the popular consciousness. As well it might: there’s something eternal in its themes of loss, ageing, and the lies we live by. Fear and lust rub up against each other, sweatily; few other writers have captured the heat of the South like Williams, and this is the playwright at his most atmospheric. Blanche DuBois – the deluded southern belle who shacks up with her sister and her macho, abusive husband – is a summit part for an actress, and everyone from Vivien Leigh to Tallulah Bankhead, Cate Blanchett to Gillian Anderson have had a go. HW
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Oresteia (458 BC), Aeschylus The only surviving full trilogy of Greek tragedies, through Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides Aeschylus traces the impact of violence and revenge down a Royal family, throwing questions of justice and duty into sharp relief. To win the Trojan war, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter; the trilogy opens with a play in which his wife Clytemnestra kills him to avenge her daughter’s death. In Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra’s son Orestes murders her in retaliation (if Antigone is a tragedy because it’s a conflict between right and right, this is perhaps a clash between wrong and wrong). The cycle is broken in Eumenides, where the gods form a court in which to try Orestes. It’s juicy, meaty, high-octane stuff – and has been given era-defining productions both in Peter Hall masked version at the National in 1981, and in Robert Icke’s crisp modern adaptation in 2015. HW
Manuel Harlan
40 of the greatest plays ever written Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1989), August Wilson Part of the playwright’s cycle exploring the African-American experience in 20th century American – a play for each decade – this chapter is set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927. Ma Rainey, the “mother of the blues”, is slow to show up to record some tunes. Instead, we watch her band kill time and spar with one another. Although it all lands light as a butterfly, the script is stinging on subjects such as ambition and race relations. Ma Rainey, when she arrives, proves worth waiting for: an immense, haughty presence. There’s a twist towards the end, giving the play punch – plus the tunes are great, of course. HW
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written A Doll’s House (1879), Henrik Ibsen Ibsen wrote great women: we could have gone for Hedda Gabler. But A Doll’s House is one of those plays with a wide significance: written in 1879, it’s a proto-feminist text. When our troubled heroine Nora slams the door at the end of the play, it’s not just on her patronising husband, but on the whole of The Patriarchy. The play shocked some in its portrayal of a woman made so desperate by her suffocating domestic situation that she abandons her children as well as her husband, choosing freedom and self-actualistion over the prison of the home. Of course, things have changed for women since, but this exceptionally controlled play still unfolds perfectly – and that slam still resonates. HW
JOHAN PERSSON
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Seagull (1895), Anton Chekhov You could make a case for any of Chekhov’s plays really (we nearly went for his early, entertaining Platonov, just to be different) but the lucidity of The Seagull wins out. It’s got more plot, a sliver less ennui, than some of his others: a young man, Konstantin, longs to be a playwright; his narcissistic mother Arkadina – an actress – is wrapped up in her new boyfriend, Trigorin, a successful novelist. He in turn romances Nina, Konstantin’s girlfriend and an aspiring actress. It’s not much of a spoiler to say none of their dreams exactly come true, life proving endlessly, exquisitely disappointing. The Seagull is a mordant comedy – scenes skewering both Arkadina’s monstrous ego and her son’s attempts at avant garde art are some of the best bits of theatre-about-theatre ever. But there’s also an unbearable tenderness to the play’s portrayal of young love, hope, and idealism. HW
Ben Carpenter
40 of the greatest plays ever written Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), Bertolt Brecht Few, if any, playwrights of the 20th century had as much of an impact on theatre as Brecht: he wanted art to be a political tool rather than escapist entertainment, but also revolutionised theatrical form and style, doing away with naturalism. But it can mean his “epic theatre” is still associated with didacticism, rather than drama. Not so Mother Courage, though, which is epic in both senses: written after Hitler invaded Poland, but set during the Thirty-Years' War, it is a potent story of one mother’s attempts to profit from conflict, and the huge cost war always takes in the end. HW
Scott Rylander
40 of the greatest plays ever written Medea (431BC), Euripides Based on the Greek myth where Medea kills her children in order to get revenge on her unfaithful husband, this tragedy has lost none of its force – or power to shock. But the text allows more sympathetic readings Medea too, as a woman fighting for justice in an unjust world. With a monumental lead part, and a chorus who react and comment on the action, the play has always been one of the most popular of the Greek tragedies. Taut and tense, you see the horror coming but feel desperately compelled to look. HW
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40 of the greatest plays ever written Frozen (1998), Bryony Lavery The mother of a murdered child. Her imprisoned paedophile killer. A criminal psychologist attempting to understand what drove him to do it. Through first monologues, and then dialogue, this modem classic has much to say about the extremes of human anguish, but also our capacity for change, and for forgiveness. It’s a dark and thorny work, but a deeply humane one too, by a prolific British writer at her best. HW
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Oscar Wilde Has there every been such a reliably delightful comedy? The improbable plot of tangled engagements, lost handbags, invented wicked relatives, and real monstrous aunts runs like clockwork. There are innumerable blissful one-liners, the characters are delicious upper-class twits, and at every turn Wilde has a fine old time pricking societal niceties. It’s frothy fun, and funny froth, and always invites larger-than-life performances. Being so very bankable has led to Wilde’s play certainly being over-staged and it now feels thoroughly un-urgent – and then it makes you laugh all over again. HW
Anthony Devlin/PA
40 of the greatest plays ever written Bent (1979), Martin Sherman Sherman’s harrowing play pulls the rug from under you. You invest in the relationship between Max and Rudy, a decadent gay couple in Berlin in 1934 – but after the Night of the Long Knives they flee, before being caught and sent to Dachau. On the way, Max’s desire to survive produces sickening betrayal. He pretends to be Jewish rather than gay, but in the camp meets Horst, a man who reveals the honour in being true to one’s self. There’s an astonishing scene where – forbidden to touch – they have sex purely through words. Ian McKellen originally played Max, but Richard Gere and Alan Cummings have also taken on the role in what is now seen as seminal gay text – one that proves truth and love may flower in the most horrific, hopeless circumstances. HW
40 of the greatest plays ever written Our Country’s Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker (1988) Ah, the transformative power of theatre… This familiar idea is irresistibly proven by Wertenbaker’s oft-revived play, based on a true story about a group of convicts in an Australian penal colony who put on a production of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. It has fun sending up the pretensions of theatre, but ultimately uses it as means for talking about empathy, communication, and understanding, as relations between the reviled prisoners and the cruel officers thaw. A direct piece of storytelling with a huge heart. HW
40 of the greatest plays ever written The Effect (2012), Lucy Prebble Lucy Prebble made her name with ENRON, charting the hubris of the financial giant, but while it may be less flashy, The Effect is still dazzlingly good. It has, at its heart, a question we’d all like to know the answer to: what is love? The play follows two volunteers in a clinical trial for a new anti-depressant; when they fall for each other, they wonder whether their love is “real”, or a by-product. And given all interactions in the brain are just chemical, does it even matter? The idea of what’s really real and what’s really romantic, what happiness is and what function unhappiness might have, are turned over by Prebble’s own very sharp mind. Her characters are fun to spend time with, her dialogue is snappy, but she digs deep too, into both scientific theories and human emotions, taking us from the grey lows of depression to the technicolour highs of new love. HW
Geraint Lewis
40 of the greatest plays ever written Jerusalem (2009), Jez Butterworth It can be hard to separate this play from an animating original performance by the great Mark Rylance, who played Johnny “Rooster” Byron – a wild misfit who lives in a caravan in the woods in rural England, gathering local young people to him like some kind of drink-and-drug-fuelled pied piper. Such a summary might sound tawdry, yet set on St George’s Day and ripe with Rooster’s storytelling, it has a mythic, mystical quality. A state-of-the-nation show powered by anti-establishment brio, it also precisely captures a contemporary rural community (very sweary, and very funny). Jerusalem became a ridiculously big hit, with audiences camping out round the theatre for tickets. But a recent revival suggests the play can still crow, whoever plays Rooster. HW
Simon Annand
40 of the greatest plays ever written An Oak Tree (2005), Tim Crouch What makes a great play? A lot of critics, academics, and playwrights themselves will point to form matching content. On this, Tim Crouch’s glitteringly clever play really delivers – while also being extremely moving. A stage hypnotist encounters the father of a girl he killed in a car accident. The father truly believes his daughter has been transformed into oak tree. At every performance, the father is played by an actor who’s never seen or read the play before; they are given a script or fed lines by – yes – the hypnotist (played initially by Crouch himself, also acknowledging his “real” role as the playwright). The actor is transformed before us; we accept that they are now the father. An Oak Tree has a radical honesty which has made it hugely influential among younger generation. We always know theatre isn’t “real” – by playfully acknowledging that, the emotional impact is actually heightened. It’s a magic trick where understanding the trickery only makes the magic more real. HW
Nina Urban
40 of the greatest plays ever written Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), Athol Fugard Athol Fugard came to see that the righteous anger of didactic anti-apartheid drama was not as effective as the subversive laughter of the black townships when it came to getting across the harshness of the conditions there. Certainly, there is nothing moralising or solemn about this piece which was developed by Fugard from improvisations with the great John Kani and Winston Ntosha who first performed it. A mischievous shaggy dog story, it pulls the audience into an atmosphere of good-humoured sociability. Sizwe is a work-seeker in Port Elizabeth who can't get a job because he doesn't have a permit. It turns out that he has found a dead man's pass book and has substituted his own photo, killing off Sizwe Bansi. A deceptively light and humane play that outlasts the apartheid era. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Purgatory in Ingolstadt (1924) / Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1928), Marieluise Fleisser Marieluise Fleisser, the author of these sorely neglected plays, was the lover, protégée, and victim of Bertolt Brecht, and her subject was the lower Bavarian city of her birth. The plays use a bold collage technique instead of linear narrative, and she had penetrating insights into its vicious pack mentality and conformist claustrophobia. In Purgatory, she evokes a stifling Catholic ethos: we see two very different rebels (one girl seeks in vain for an abortion) who suffer the humiliation of having to crawl back to the pack. Brecht effectively hijacked her second play Pioneers (about the contact between the inhabitants and a visiting squad of bridge-builders). He imposed overt anti-militarism and sensationalising sex, and Fleisser was denounced as a traitor to German womanhood. Stephen Daldry and Annie Castledine directed a superb version of these plays at the tiny Gate Theatre in 1991. Since when, nothing. It's high time Fleisser was given her due. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Copenhagen (1998), Michael Frayn Tempting as it is to include Michael Frayn’s sublimely funny backstage farce, Noises Off, the more serious Copenhagen just pips it. It imagines a real meeting between nuclear physicists, the Dane Niels Bohr and German Werner Heisenberg, in Copenhagen in 1941, to discuss developments that will lead to the atomic bomb. Then he reimagines the meeting, and reimagines it again – after all, no-one really knows what happened. Was Heisenberg warning his old friend of the Nazis’ advances in nuclear weapons? Hoping for a mutual pact to prevent the atomic bomb? Seeking absolution? Looking at the unreliability of memory, the structure of Frayn’s play is cleverly animated by the scientific ideas his characters discuss: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the basis for its dramatic form. A big hit when it opened at the National, it went to the West End, Broadway – and wound up on TV, starring Daniel Craig. HW
Conrad Blakemore
40 of the greatest plays ever written Blasted (1995), Sarah Kane This play was a theatrical explosion. Sarah Kane’s debut, written while she was a student, features a nasty tabloid journalist holed up in a Leeds hotel with a much younger woman, whom he sexually abuses. The world of the play – and its conventional theatrical form – is then blasted apart becoming a war zone: a soldier bursts in, explosions go off, and short scenes of grim horror unfold (stage directions include “he eats the baby”). Famously described as a “disgusting feast of filth”, Blasted was seen by critics as a puerile attempt to shock, and anointed as the classic example of provocative, Nineties in-yer-face theatre. But it’s since become canonical. It doesn’t seem to grow old: Kane’s writing has a horribly vivid energy, and the atrocities it depicts, depressingly, take on fresh resonance for each generation that discovers it. HW
Mark Douet
40 of the greatest plays ever written La Dispute (1744), Pierre de Marivaux Who committed the first infidelity? Was it a man, or was it a woman? (You can bet it was a man who first thought of this prurient question.) The court in Marivaux's dark comedy thinks it has created the right laboratory conditions for finding out the answer. Four teenagers have been brought up in complete solitude and then are released into each other's company where their encounters will furnish “a most original entertainment” for the unseen Prince and his fiancée. The play incisively shows how easy it is to turn a stage into an experimental blank slate. But it feels a bit pervy – the Enlightenment's idea of reality television. Marivaux is elegantly conscious of the objections. There are razor blades secreted in the rococo décor of his works. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Henry IV (1922), Pirandello It's easy to make Pirandello sound like a forbiddingly cerebral writer. All his life he played tricksy games with philosophical problems such as the deceptiveness of identity. But his aim was to “to convert intellect into passion” and his best works succeed in doing so. Henry IV is about madness, the appearance of madness, and the consequence of deciding to become trapped within the appearance of madness. The protagonist is an Italian nobleman who falls from his horse at a pageant and comes round, convinced that he's the medieval German Emperor. For 20 years, he has been allowed to live this illusion, attended by flunkies in period-costume. But now comes an embassy bent on “shocking” him from this idee fixe. Richard Harris and Ian McDiarmid were the last pair to play Henry in the West End and they relished the chance to interweave the quizzicality and raw pain that the part requires. The predicament of the central character feels more tragicomically stimulating than far-fetched. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Lorraine Hansberry This play made history: the first on Broadway written by a black woman (shamefully, Britain wouldn’t have its equivalent – a play in the West End by a black British woman – until last year, with Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night). A Raisin in the Sun looks at the Youngers, an African-American family living in poverty in Chicago, dreaming of a better life – and fearing that their dreams will shrivel up like “a raisin in the sun”. Hansberry’s aching drama exhibits the same forceful tug as an Arthur Miller play, laying out how circumstances can crush hope. Its discussion of black identity, however, still crackles today – and the emotional punch that Hansberry’s script carries has drawn big names down the decade: Sidney Poitier starred in the premiere, and everyone from Denzel Washington to P Diddy has also had a crack. Hansberry died at only 34; one can’t help but wonder what other plays she might have had on this list. HW
Johan Persson
40 of the greatest plays ever written Far Away (2000), Caryl Churchill Caryl Churchill has been called the Picasso of modern playwrights. Today, at the age of 80, the British playwright continues startlingly to reinvent herself. Far Away is a twisted fairy tale that demonstrates her matchless gift for merging the apocalyptic and the fantastical. It unfolds in three episodes that shelve steeply. In the first, Joan is quizzing her aunt about what she has just accidentally witnessed. It sounds as if she has espied a bloody act of ethnic cleansing. Then the play escalates into a blackly hilarious vision of cosmic warfare. Partisan brutality has now spread from humans to the animal and mineral world. “The cats have come in on the side of the French,” someone says earnestly. The “natural goodness of deer has come through” says someone else. This is characteristic of Churchill, finding a brilliantly absurdist way of attacking the pernicious myth that there is a simple divide between virtue and evil, “them” and “us”. A sliver of genius. PT
40 of the greatest plays ever written Arcadia (1993), Tom Stoppard Tom Stoppard sometimes gets accused of being all head and no heart – but this play proves otherwise. Yes, it’s a mind-achingly clever look at both science and art, pitting the rational against the romantic, while giving you mini lessons in chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics and the life and shaggings of Lord Byron. But there’s a love story and a tragedy here, that in a well-calibrated production can be very moving. Two stories, set in the same country house, in 1809 and the present day, intersect and eventually overlap beautifully. The mathematic theorising forecasts hope as well as disaster for the universe, and the story offers the same for its characters. HW
The emotional centrality of the father figure in her fictional universe (where his daughter was always positioned to redeem him) comes through strongly in Mary Poppins Returns (2018), the Disney “sequel” to the 1964 movie. The mother figure is killed at the outset here in a story that catches up with little Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw ) in adulthood, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now a widower with semi-effectual artistic yearnings, a humble job as a teller at his father’s old bank and a scatter of motherless children, he’s a man who must be in want of, yes, a nanny. Cue the descent of Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt ) and a loving retread of bygone cinematic glories.
The various homages to the set pieces and artwork of the original film bear out the philosophy expounded by the chimney sweep Bert, played in the 1964 classic by Dick Van Dyke (whose accent immortally bears the same relation to genuine Cockney that Joan Collins’s way with vowels bears to the tones of echt un-Hollywoodised “posh”). Bert has a murmurous premonition in the original film: “Can’t put me finger on what lies in store/ But I fear what’s to happen all happened before.” He can say that again, for this is how the Poppins sequel proves to be patterned.
Cameron Mackintosh, the uber-impresario who would go on to produce Cats , The Phantom of the Opera , and Miss Saigon , first saw the Disney movie and fell in love with Julie Andrews just after he left school. On reading the credits, he discovered that the film had been based on the books of one PL Travers. He quickly devoured all of them. That’s the key difference, I think, between his quest to secure the equivalent stage rights and Walt Disney’s attempt to woo the screen rights out of the author. Disney was fulfilling a promise that he had made to his daughter, Diane, who was a fan of the books. Mackintosh was already a genuine devotee. The movie mogul and the fiercely protective author both came from damaged backgrounds and both were accustomed to getting their own way. As a consequence, their negotiations represented a stubborn collision between people with certain strong resemblances of temperament.
Dick Van Dyke (left) and Julie Andrews (right) in ‘Mary Poppins’ (Disney) The Mary Poppins books are wondrous in their own right. Richard Eyre, who was prompted to read them by Mackintosh’s enthusiasm, describes their “dizzying succession of surreal scenes that blend myth and magic with domestic life without a trace of sentimentality”. He likens their space/time coordinates to those you’d find in the books of Philip Pullman. He itemises some of the episodes that make you do a double-take, as ravishingly abnormal experiences are passed off as Mary Poppins’ day-to-day normal, thank you very much. Mrs Corry sticks gingerbread stars to the ceiling of the sky. There’s a zoo for human beings where the animals are the keepers.
Travers intended her stories to appeal to adults too; so as you lightly tap each slightly crazy facet in the dangly mobiles the stories seem to create, it’s as if you are setting off a wind chime of resonances with other classic children’s literature (especially Peter Pan ). Travers’ biographer, Valerie Lawson, talks of the writer’s “hunger for esoteric”. How many other authors have hunkered down for long periods with, say, the Navajo? All this comes across.
Primed with a formidable affection for the books, Mackintosh finally met Travers in 1993 when she was old, frail and as sharp as a tack. It’s not hard to picture the canny-but-sincere charm-offensive that he put up. Knowing the mind-set of her iconic nanny so well, he would not have been fazed by Travers’ similar tactics of mustard-sharp evasion. How, she asked, could she possibly know the answer to questions about a character who had simply appeared to her. At all events, he was able to convince her that he wanted to imbue his stage musical with the spirit of her stories and not just buy the Poppins name for a lazy, money-spinning transposition from screen to stage.
Zizi Strallen as Mary Poppins and Charlie Stemp as Bert (Seamus Ryan) Mackintosh had evidently taught himself how to “read” her in more ways than one. And this resulted in eventual creative concord with the Disney organisation who at first needed some persuading that a stage musical should be countenanced. Indeed, it’s not too far-fetched to wonder if Mackintosh had started to channel Travers. Thomas Schumacher, who became the very open-minded head of Disney Theatrical Productions in 2001, showed him the sheaves of material that had accumulated in relation to a movie sequel that was approved but never made. Working in the shade of the Sydney Opera House, he was delighted to discover that what she had wanted to include in the sequel tallied with what he was toying with for the stage musical.
Starring Zizi Strallen as Mary (with the great Petula Clark as the Bird Woman), the show is billed as “a musical based on the stories of PL Travers and the Walt Disney film”. It has a new book by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey ); witty songs by British composers, Stiles and Drewe, are integrated into the original score by the Sherman Brothers that has run through the veins like Lucozade since it was first heard in 1964. I won’t spoil it for you by giving away how the reconception is imbued with the atmosphere of the stories. Except to say that the statues in the park do not behave as well-brought-up statues should and keep to their place. In the same scene, perambulators join forces to put one in mind of Boudica.
Richard Eyre identifies why the appeal of this material is imperishable. It records the intervention of a benignly mysterious being on a dysfunctional family. So prepare to slide up the banisters at the Prince Edward. With any luck, this version of Poppins will pull off a new aeronautical trick and make copies of the Travers books fly off the shelves.
Prince Edward Theatre, London – currently booking until 29 March 2020
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