The Royal Court: Caught in the spotlights

The Royal Court has a glorious past, but on its 50th anniversary, has the current artistic director, Ian Rickson, any answers to the questions over its future? Paul Taylor reports

This looks set to be a historic year for the Royal Court - and in more ways than one. In April, it will be half a century since the English Stage Company under George Devine took up residence in its Victorian premises in Sloane Square in west London and established our national theatre of new writing.

The year-long birthday celebrations will include a gala tribute on 8 May to Look Back in Anger, John Osborne's ground-breaking play which - at this address, 50 years ago to the day- enjoyed the most celebrated and arguably the most influential theatrical debut of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, looking ahead in expectancy, the board is searching for a new artistic director to succeed Ian Rickson, who steps down at the end of 2006 after eight years at the helm. The interviews are scheduled for later this month, with an announcement expected in February.

These developments occur at a time when the Court has come under attack for being a theatre of consolidation rather than controversy, worthy but not exciting. I have heard the term "goody-goody" bandied about by a disgruntled member of the old guard. The cutting-edge action has shifted, according to this view, to the National Theatre, arrestingly politicised by Nick Hytner, and to the fringe, in punchy programming at new spaces such as the Menier and the Arcola.

When the English Stage Company was formed, the Court offered virtually the only alternative to the staid West End. Now, in a sense, it is the victim of its own success in championing the cause of new writing. So, as the theatre begins to unroll its retrospective, it seems opportune to reflect on the Royal Court, its philosophy and what it represents. The 50th birthday celebrations will give the artistic director-designate a thorough crash-course in the institution's past. What could he or she learn from the pivotal moments in the Court's history?

The theatre's strong sense of its own tradition is evident in Ian Rickson's office, where we meet to talk about 2006-and-all-that and about the tricky balancing acts required by the job. The room is festooned with photographs of illustrious predecessors. There is the white-haired George Devine, who formulated the essential principle that the Royal Court should be "a place where the dramatist is acknowledged as the fundamental creative force in the theatre and where the play is more important than the actors, the director, the designer". There's a rehearsal snap of Bill Gaskill, a key figure in the Court's fights with the Lord Chamberlain, the censor whose role (partly thanks to the Court's agitation) was abolished in 1968. Another photograph shows Rickson flanked by Max Stafford-Clark who, in the lean, mean 1980s, was wonderfully responsive to the new wave of female dramatists (for whom Caryl Churchill was the role model), and by Stephen Daldry, whose flamboyant tenure coincided with the in-yer-face, blood-and-sperm boom.

"We are all such anoraks about the past," Rickson laughs. "I could probably tell you off the top of my head what was on here in September 1971." But reminiscing about the past could be seen as an odd activity for a theatre dedicated to discovering the future. And anniversaries can go horribly wrong, as is witnessed by the centenary fiasco at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2004-05.

Rickson says it did cross his mind to eschew any marking of the occasion. "But, to be self-critical, I would say that I haven't been a very showy artistic director or particularly skilful at promoting the Royal Court, and I felt that these 50 years are worth applauding and that it would good for me to be part of it."

The season juggles present and past with dexterity. "The best way of celebrating," Rickson says, "is by being most true to ourselves, and I thought that the most exuberant thing would be to put the largest body of new work on the stages that we could manage." So the theatres upstairs and down will premiere pieces by young Turks (such as Simon Stephens and Tanika Gupta) and established figures (such as Terry Johnson and Tom Stoppard). Running alongside will be a series of forums, special events and 50 rehearsed readings of plays that chart the evolution of the Royal Court. This begins next Monday with David Hare directing Osborne's The Entertainer.

The spirit is by no means curatorial. Rickson says: "If you place these encounters with the past in conjunction with the work of contemporary writers, you create a sort of dialectic that will hopefully stimulate the emerging generation and help us to move forward." It's not about dusting things down, it's about trying to organise a healthy dust-up.

"One idea we toyed with quite early on was to have a company and do a play from each decade. But I felt that that was a bit dutiful and syllabus-like, and that the programming would offend more people than it would please. They'd say, 'How could you possibly not be doing X or Y?'"

But it's one of the new projects - Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, which focuses on the history of Czechoslovakia from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution - that caused some offence. Bill Gaskill, who was to have directed his adaptation of the Sirens episode in Ulysses, has stalked off in disgust. Which is no big surprise; on a panel, Gaskill once declared that while it is hard to define what a Royal Court play is, we all know what it isn't - and that's a play written by Tom Stoppard.

The provocation seems to have been compounded by the fact that the production brings Trevor Nunn into the building. There has been a mischievous rumour that Nunn is positioning himself for the grand slam - the first man to be appointed head of the RSC, National and Royal Court. But Rickson is unrepentant: "It's absolutely constitutionally enshrined here that, if you can, you go along with the author's choice of director."

And younger dramatists are baffled by the idea that the Court should reject a play because the author is deemed ideologically unsound. "My generation finds that attitude bizarre and sterile," says Joe Penhall, whose Some Voices launched the extraordinary 1994-95 season that included Sarah Kane's Blasted. "We just want to see really good work," Penhall says. Likewise, Mark Ravenhill, who gave the theatre Shopping and Fucking, argues that Court plays should "have swagger and attitude and ask the really awkward political questions instead of being predictably left-wing".

George Devine once said that "the theatre is really a religion or a way of life," and the Gaskill brouhaha (described by an amused Daldry as "a classic piece of Royal Court argy-bargy") illustrates how prone this place is to fierce doctrinal disputes. But then, as Hare has wittily written, it's "a place of intense contradiction. A writers' theatre whilst plays are chosen at the whim of directors; a political theatre which has often violently eschewed politics; a theatre which once had the strongest aesthetic of any in the country which nobody could define - except by what it wasn't; and a theatre with a genuine sense of family, so long as your idea of family includes dysfunctional. Half in the mainstream, half out..."

There was a tension from the start between the Royal Court as a theatre of political engagement and the Royal Court as a theatre of artistic experiment. People assume that Devine set out to create an angry, dissident institution. In fact, his leanings were towards works of European modernism - Ionesco, Beckett and Pirandello. You could say that he was benignly ambushed by Look Back in Anger, the only good play among the 700 he received in response to a Stage advert. Hare may now use Osborne as a stick with which to beat Beckett, but Devine's Royal Court had room for both (the world premiere of Endgame featured in the second season).

There's an intriguing link here with Stephen Daldry, whose comparably fertile tenure began with the mission to turn the Court into more of an art theatre, bringing in DV8 with a dance piece about cottaging, and Neil Bartlett with Night After Night, a musical about the relationship between gay sons and their fathers and about the homosexual subtexts in this most boy-meets-girl of genres. But, like Devine, Daldry was thrown off course by the sudden explosion of new writing from the Sarah Kane generation.

The pivotal moments in the Court's artistic history have come when a fresh political/social vision and formal * * innovation unite. One thinks of Jimmy Porter's distended, scathing tirades in Look Back in Anger, which show a bracing lack of respect for the rather conventional play that contains them; or of the horror of Bosnia bursting into a Leeds hotel room in Blasted; or of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, where the artificial nature of sexual conditioning is exposed by blatant mis-matches of casting and where, in a way that brings out the ambivalences of liberation, the characters age by only 20 years as they progress from Victorian Imperial Africa in the first act to the polymorphous perversities of 1970s England in the second.

A pivotal moment in the Court's institutional history illustrates how the theatre's success in promoting a new writing culture has been regularly held against it. In 1983, Max Stafford-Clark had to fight for the theatre's very existence when it looked as though the Arts Council was going to withdraw its grant on the grounds that the same work could be done more cheaply in places such as the Cottesloe. The resulting campaign, he tells me, demonstrated the strength of sentimental support for this institution.

How does he account for this? "Because the Royal Court represents the romantic conscience" is his answer. But, as Rickson points out, the suggestion that the theatre has outlived its mission has a long ancestry. "In the mid-Seventies, there was a television documentary in which Tony Richardson [Devine's co-director] declared that 'the Royal Court is a revolution achieved'."

The headache for an artistic director is finding the right balance between trying to renew that revolution and sustaining the talent of the theatre's stock of writers. Again, success has its penalties. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Court was so flush with the work of Osborne and David Storey that the emergent generation headed by David Hare and Howard Brenton felt shut out. Stafford-Clark recalls Brenton complaining that "Sloane Square is littered with the corpses of writers thrown from the battlements of the Royal Court".

By the same token, Rickson reckons that his regime has come under attack from novelty-hungry critics because he has concentrated on consolidating the careers of writers such as Conor McPherson, Rebecca Gilman and Roy Williams who, in his time, have evolved into mainstage dramatists.

There are few directors who have a more sensitive feel for a play's musical structure or who can draw richer performances from actors than Rickson. But not even his best friends would claim that he is a charismatic or media-savvy figurehead. One longed for the Royal Court to be at the centre of the debate about censorship that was sparked by the Sikh protests against Behzti at the Birmingham Rep and the proposed law against incitement to religious hatred. But it was Nick Hytner at the National who brilliantly seized the initiative here, declaring that: "I claim the right to be as offensive as I choose about what other people think, and to tell any story I choose. No one has the right not to be offended."

George Devine reflected ruefully: "I wanted to change the attitude of the public towards the theatre. All I did was to change the attitude of the theatre towards the public." In an ideal world, the Royal Court would be attracting the kind of people who read the London Review of Books, go to Tate Modern and attend Rufus Wainwright concerts. But a large part of that constituency regard new writing, or rather New Writing, in the theatre as at best a form of social work. You could argue that they are unlikely to be converted by an artistic director whose background is almost entirely in that field. (When Rickson bows out with a production of The Seagull, it will be the first occasion he has directed a classic.)

So the board could shake things up by appointing a successor who has more eclectic tastes and is a better publicist. I suspect that they will short-list Thea Sharrock, whose programming at Notting Hill's tiny Gate Theatre has been admirably adventurous - ranging from a visceral promenade production of Tejas Verdes, a play about the disappeared of Chile, to a knock-out revival of Hair updated to strike a chord with the sentiments of today's anti-war movement.

I would be very surprised if they did not consider Tom Morris, who, as the maverick producer of BAC, nurtured the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera through its long gestation before it and he were scooped up by the National. His "ladder of development" scheme in Battersea (starting with Scratch Nights, where all-comers could present a 10-minute extract from work in progress, ending in full productions), was not dissimilar to the Court's own ladder of development for playwrights, albeit covering a vast array of modes, from puppetry to operas about Newsnight. Backed by the right associates and a strong literary manager, this natural motivator might be the man to bring the political and the experimental strands of the Court's work into fresh creative collision at a time when disenchantment with New Labour is oddly coinciding with a swing of taste towards auteur-style theatre.

Among the people who have worked at this address before, there is the eminently eligible figure of Dominic Cooke, now Michael Boyd's blue-eyed boy at the RSC, which is, I gather, desperate to keep him. More than any other theatre, argues Roy Williams, the Royal Court challenges dramatists to surpass themselves, and it helps if there are "directors who have the ability to know your play almost better than you do". From talking to several young writers, it's clear that Cooke is richly blessed with this talent.

One of the theatre's chief glories is its international department, which takes the Royal Court's philosophy and practice to countries with little or no playwriting culture and reaps the benefits when it discovers a striking new voice. Cooke was intimately connected with one of their greatest successes here, developing and brilliantly directing Plasticine, Vassily Sigarev's comic-grotesque vision of contemporary urban Russia, which garnered an Evening Standard Award. If the board is looking for the best in terms of continuity rather than radical change, Cooke would be the natural choice.

Whoever is appointed, it's plain from examining the Court's 50-year history that an artistic director needs to be ready to run with the unexpected, as Devine and Daldry did. Mark Ravenhill offers a mischievous analogy from politics; asked by a journalist what can most easily steer a government off course, Harold Macmillan famously answered: "Events, dear boy, events." Ravenhill says: "You want someone who will come in with a strong plan, but then be prepared to tear it up and happily say that what caused the change of direction was 'playwrights, dear boy, playwrights'."