State of play

Never mind television and cinema and the internet. Theatre is once again Britain's most vital and challenging art form, argues our new drama critic Kate Bassett

I think I actually skipped along the Aldwych and into the Strand. It was 1979 and I was 12. I'd just seen Love's Labour's Lost directed, I believe, by John Barton for the RSC and I was, manifestly, ecstatic. Looking back, I suspect this was a formative experience. Reader, I became a drama critic.

I think I actually skipped along the Aldwych and into the Strand. It was 1979 and I was 12. I'd just seen Love's Labour's Lost directed, I believe, by John Barton for the RSC and I was, manifestly, ecstatic. Looking back, I suspect this was a formative experience. Reader, I became a drama critic.

So, now I can go to the theatre nightly and call it work. To be honest, I don't hop and jump about a great deal these days. But I do vividly recall and value the life-enhancing kick I got from that production: the sense of both intellectual illumination and sheer festive joy.

I would say that, at root, it's an eye-opening and thrilling experience of that calibre that I am always hoping to find when I enter an auditorium. And mercifully, every now and then one is fully rewarded.

I was certainly happy as Larry at the National Theatre's earthily workmanlike and exquisite recent revival of Tony Harrison's Mysteries, where God stood aloft, foreman-like on a forklift truck, with us lot milling around his feet, and where the heavens were a hundred light bulbs charmingly winking inside an array of ironmonger's wares - dangling cheese-graters, dustbins and miners' lamps.

Other high points have included all performances by Judi Dench; by the subtly brilliant Stephen Dillane; by Simon Russell Beale and Victoria Hamilton (both key members in Trevor Nunn's recent excellent ensemble at the National).

Also unforgettable was Shared Experience theatre company's touring adaptation of The Mill On The Floss, characteristically marrying insight and fierce emotion, a classic text and inspired physical expressionism.

However, reporting individual delights like these does not stop pundits regularly announcing that theatre is an art form heading for oblivion. And that is alarming.

In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher's regime was certainly financially crippling for the theatre, and some closed for ever. With core funding on standstill thereafter, regional venues have notably found themselves in continuing difficulties. For instance, just a few months back, Bolton's cash-strapped Octagon Theatre was nearly turned into a receiving rather than an active producing house, and it was only saved by staff and locals rallying round.

During the early Nineties, when I started reviewing, headlines also appeared warning that the West End was swiftly going to the dogs, with many theatres dark or merely hosting shoddy bio-musicals. There were widespread anxieties within the profession about playwrighting being a dying craft too. Right now, as we enter the high-tech 21st century, it's obviously tempting to ask if the stage is out-of-date and to highlight the challenges it faces from contemporary entertainments and leisure activities - most obviously TV, the movies and the internet.

Nevertheless, countering all that pessimism, the current state of play in the theatre is actually decidedly encouraging on many fronts.

I would hazard a guess that the recent drive towards cheap TV programming and its dumbing down have driven ranks of citizens out of their living rooms in search of better arts and entertainment in public venues. I'm also not convinced the net is going to produce future generations of stay-at-home IT and virtual-reality addicts.

In any case, if you want film projection or indeed e-mail conversations, these have been incorporated into experimental stage sets and scripts with wit and style - in the National's production of Patrick Marber's Closer, in the Royal Court's staging, last month, of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, and elsewhere.

Across the UK, it's estimated that live arts sell more tickets than Premier League football matches and that playhouses may get as many as 31 million bums on seats every year. The West End has been doing well, too. The average number of venues open there during 1999 (totting up to 44) was higher than in previous years, looking at computations dating back to 1986. Those venues' incoming productions (totalling 265 last year) likewise were record breaking, and their gross box office revenue rose to over £266,500,000 (it was little over £112,000,000 in 1986). A sizeable chunk of that money of course feeds back, via taxation, into the state's coffers. The Wyndham Report - which surveyed the West End theatre industry - declared the business was a mainstay of the new British economy.

Artistically, the West End was revitalised in the mid-to-late Nineties. An unexpected wave of young dramatists suddenly emerged and the Royal Court Theatre, which nurtures new plays, moved into town while its Sloane Square base was being rebuilt with Lottery funding. It duly presented works by a clutch of bold and talented writers including Conor McPherson who penned The Weir, a long-running hit which transferred to Broadway.

The Almeida Theatre Company, though based in Islington, also migrated to WC2 for a time and they've been substantially responsible for the increasing international pulling-power that the London stage has acquired, attracting seriously talented Hollywood stars like Kevin Spacey with classic plays and premiÿres.

Spacey is now campaigning to secure the future of the beleaguered Old Vic in Waterloo while Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty, has returned to run the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, turning down film deals en route. The British theatre is patently the place to be.

The excellent news this summer, in terms of funding, has been that Gordon Brown's new spending review has promised the Arts Council of England a very welcome budget increase of £100 million and £40 million has been tagged for new regional theatre productions. That said, no institution can afford to rest on its laurels. The money won't be coming through till 2002; some will have a tough time eking out their current cash reserves.

There may be some other disappointments ahead, too. As a theatre-goer, it's hard to get excited about the National's forthcoming unadventurous programming of Michael Frayn's well-thumbed farce, Noises Off. And with the Royal Court now back in Chelsea, the heart of Theatreland doesn't feel so electric.

Meanwhile, some of the new Lottery-funded theatre buildings around the country may find it hard to attract crowds in towns where there's no tradition of play-going.

As for new writing, numbers of fledgling playwrights are now being nurtured in diverse theatres, including regional centres like Manchester's Royal Exchange and Birmingham Rep. Great in theory, but whether there are really enough excellent scripts to go round and to merit public productions remains to be seen. Moreover, some of the new writers of 2000 are showing a tendency to turn out psychologically shallow sitcom-style or soapy scripts. One might wonder if the links and deals some theatres have with TV and film companies encourage this.

But the innate strengths of the theatrical medium remain. Because it's traditionally text-led, a play can discuss big themes and challenging ideas. Because they're relatively cheap to assemble, plays can respond fast to social issues. They portray how we live with extraordinary immediacy - not just in moving, talking pictures, but in muscular, breathing 3-D. And as such, I'd argue theatre is vital in both senses of the word. It's alive and kicking, and it makes an incalculably important contribution to our culture.